STATISTICAL-MECHANICS OF THE DEFORMABLE DROPLETS ON FLAT SURFACES

A comprehensive statistical mechanics treatment of (non)interacting de formable planar droplets of arbitrary rigidity is developed. Closed fo rm exact analytic results are obtained for the area statistics of a si ngle droplet and for the decay rates of metastable states characterist ic of the first-order phase transitions for an assembly of such drople ts. To select the correct form of the interaction between the droplets , the reparametrization invariance is taken into account. Most of the known two-dimensional lattice models are obtained as the limiting case s of the interacting droplet model discussed in the text. (C) 1996 Ame rican Institute of Physics.