Phase transitions of a tethered membrane model with intrinsic curvature on spherical surfaces with point boundaries

Abstract

We found that the order for the crumpling transition of an intrinsic curvature model changes depending on the distance between two boundary vertices fixed on the surface of spherical topology. The model is a curvature one governed by an intrinsic curvature energy, which is defined on triangulated surfaces. It was already reported that the model undergoes a first-order crumpling transition without the boundary conditions on the surface. However, the dependence of the transition on such boundary condition is yet to be studied. We have studied in this paper this problem by using the Monte Carlo simulations on surfaces up to a size N=8412. The first-order transition changes to a second-order one if the distance increases.