Prof Helen Au-Yang, Oklahoma State University

The specific heats of alternating layered planar Ising models with strips of width $m_1$ lattice spacing and ``strong'' couplings $J_1$ sandwiched by strips of width $m_2$ and ``weak'' coupling $J_2$ have been studied to investigate the effects of connectivity and proximity. We find that the enhancement in the specific heat of the strong layers due to the collective effects reflect the observations of Gasparini and coworkers in experiments on superfluid helium. In addition, we demonstrate that finite-size scaling holds in the different temperature regions after suitable rescaling and appropriate subtractions.

Based on work done with Michael E. Fisher.