Gruppo di Fisica Statistica

The influence of homogeneous surface perturbations on the surface critical behavior of the two-dimensional Ising model is studied through finite-size scaling and conformal invariance. Quantum chains of up to 2000 spins are studied in the fermionic version of the model. The results are deduced from the numerical solution of an eigenvalue equation for the excitation spectrum and show that conformal invariance still works for irrelevant surface perturbations.