Crumpling transition and flat phase of polymerized phantom membranes

Abstract

Polymerized phantom membranes are revisited using a nonperturbative renormalization group approach. This allows one to investigate both the crumpling transition and the low-temperature, flat, phase in any internal dimension D and embedding dimension d, and to determine the lower critical dimension. The crumpling phase transition for physical membranes is found to be of second order within our approximation. A weak first-order behavior, as observed in recent Monte Carlo simulations, is however not excluded.