The role of three-body interactions in two-dimensional polymer collapse‡

Abstract. Various interacting lattice path models of polymer collapse in two dimensions demonstrate different critical behaviours. This difference has been without a clear explanation. The collapse transition has been variously seen to be in the Duplantier-Saleur θ-point university class (specific heat cusp), the interacting trail class (specific heat divergence) or even first-order. Here we study via Monte Carlo simulation a generalisation of the Duplantier-Saleur model on the honeycomb lattice and also a generalisation of the so-called vertex-interacting self-avoiding walk model (configurations are actually restricted trails known as grooves) on the triangular lattice. Crucially for both models we have three and two body interactions explicitly and differentially weighted. We show that both models have similar phase diagrams when considered in these larger two-parameter spaces. They demonstrate regions for which the collapse transition is first-order for high three body interactions and regions where the collapse is in the Duplantier-Saleur θ-point university class. We conjecture a higher order multiple critical point separating these two types of collapse. 1