Abstract
The surface critical behavior of semi-infinite systems belonging to the Ising universality class with short-range interactions is investigated for supercritical surface enhancement -c>0 and vanishing surface field h1. Renormalization-group improved perturbation theory is applied to the standard semi-infinite scalar φ4 model in d=4-ε dimensions to compute the order-parameter profile to one-loop order both for temperatures T with τ≡(T-Tcb)/Tcb≳0 and τ≲0. The associated scaling functions are found to cross smoothly over from their short-distance behavior for distances zξb (=bulk correlation length) to their long-distance behavior for zξb without showing the peculiar nonmonotonic behavior asserted by Peliti and Leibler [J. Phys. C 16, 2635 (1983)]. Furthermore, the short-distance behavior of the profiles is shown to be fully consistent with a ‖τ2α singularity of the surface magnetization m1 plus a regular background term; that is, in contrast to results published recently by other authors, the amplitudes A+ and A of the contributions A±τ to m1 linear in τ>0 or τ<0 agree to one-loop order. Finally, we confirm that the universal profiles for the critical adsorption of fluids (governed by the critical-adsorption fixed point at c=+∞ and h1=∞) agree with the previous ones pertaining to the negative-c-transition fixed point at c=-∞ and h1=0.