The specific heat of thin films near the lambda-transition: A Monte Carlo study of an improved three-dimensional lattice model

Understand

We study the finite size scaling behaviour of the specific heat of thin films in the neighbourhood of the lambda-transition.

• To this end we have simulated the improved two-component phi^4 model on the simple cubic lattice.
• We employ free boundary conditions in the short direction to mimic the vanishing order parameter at the boundaries of a 4He film.
• Most of our simulations are performed for the thicknesses L_0=8,16 and 32 of the film.