Authors: Lorenzo Bertini Stella Brassesco Paolo Buttà
Publish Date: 2008/07/17
Volume: 190, Issue: 3, Pages: 477-516
Abstract
We consider the van der Waals free energy functional in a bounded interval with inhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions imposing the two stable phases at the endpoints We compute the asymptotic free energy cost as the length of the interval diverges of shifting the interface from the midpoint We then discuss the effect of thermal fluctuations by analyzing the phi4 1 measure with Dobrushin boundary conditions In particular we obtain a nontrivial limit in a suitable scaling in which the length of the interval diverges and the temperature vanishes The limiting state is not translation invariant and describes a localized interface This result can be seen as the probabilistic counterpart of the variational convergence of the associated excess free energy
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