Getting rid of the ghosts: a toy-model of membrane melting
Phys. Rev. E 114, 045503 – Published 15 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8rb1-vlrh
Abstract
The theory of thermal fluctuations in crystalline membranes is put under scrutiny. In particular, the two critical regimes of the renormalization group diagram, which are often left out of the discussion because of their instability in one direction, are examined in detail. After studying the proper Goldstone mode counting around each of them, the properties of the fluctuations dominating the large scale spectrum are analyzed. This shows that the fixed point P2 is a good candidate to describe the melting of a crystalline membrane. The properties of the melted membrane are then compared to the known properties of fluid membranes. As a byproduct of this analysis, we show that the generation of a fluid membrane by melting a bidimensional crystal allows to formulate its correlation functions without being plagued by the ghosts that inevitably show up in the usual Canham-Helfrich action relying on the Monge parametrization.
