Abstract. We extend recent studies of 3D short-ranged wetting transitions by deriving an interfacial Hamiltonian in the presence of an arbitrary external field. The binding potential functional, describing the interaction of the interface and the substrate, can still be written in a diagrammatic form, but now includes new classes of diagrams due to the coupling to the external potential, which are determined exactly. Applications to systems with long-ranged (algebraically decaying) and short-ranged (exponentially decaying) external potentials are considered at length. We show how the familiar 'sharp-kink' approximation to the binding potential emerges, and determine the corrections to this arising from interactions between bulk-like fluctuations and the external field. A connection is made with earlier local effective interfacial Hamiltonian approaches. It is shown that, for the case of an exponentially decaying potential, non-local effects have a particularly strong influence on the approach to the critical regime at second-order wetting transitions, even when they appear to be sub-dominant. This is confirmed by Monte Carlo simulation studies of a discretized version of a non-local interfacial model.

Print publication: Issue 46 (18 November 2009)
Received 8 July 2009, in final form 29 September 2009
Published 26 October 2009