Eur. Phys. J. B 47, 563-570 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2005-00355-4

Corner wetting in a far-from-equilibrium magnetic growth model

¹ IFLP, CONICET/Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Casilla de Correo 67, La Plata (1900), Argentina
² INIFTA, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, CONICET, Casilla de Correo 16, Sucursal 4, La Plata (1900), Argentina

Corresponding author: ^a ealbano@inifta.unlp.edu.ar

Received: 5 January 2005
Revised: 8 July 2005
Published online: 17 November 2005

Abstract

The irreversible growth of magnetic films is studied in three-dimensional confined geometries of size , where is the growing direction. Competing surface magnetic fields, applied to opposite corners of the growing system, lead to the observation of a localization-delocalization (weakly rounded) transition of the interface between domains of up and down spins on the planes transverse to the growing direction. This effective transition is the precursor of a true far-from-equilibrium corner wetting transition that takes place in the thermodynamic limit. The phenomenon is characterized quantitatively by drawing a magnetic field-temperature phase diagram, firstly for a confined sample of finite size, and then by extrapolating results, obtained with samples of different size, to the thermodynamic limit. The results of this work are a nonequilibrium realization of analogous phenomena recently investigated in equilibrium systems, such as corner wetting transitions in the Ising model.