Phase Transition in Lattice Surface Systems with Gonihedric Action

Abstract

We prove the existence of an ordered low temperature phase in a model of soft-self-avoiding closed random surfaces on a cubic lattice by a suitable extension of Peierls contour method. The statistical weight of each surface configuration depends only on the mean extrinsic curvature and on an interaction term arising when two surfaces touch each other along some contour. The model was introduced by F.J. Wegner and G.K. Savvidy as a lattice version of the gonihedric string, which is an action for triangulated random surfaces.