Percolation of dimers on square lattices

A theoretical approach, based on exact calculations of configurations on finite rectangular cells, is applied to study the percolation of homonuclear dimers on square lattices. An efficient algorithm allows us to calculate the detailed structure of the configuration space for M = L-x x L-y cells, with M varying from 16 to 36. The percolation process has been monitored by following the percolation function, defined as the ratio between the number of percolating configurations and the total number of available configurations for a given cell size and concentration of occupied sites. The percolation threshold has been calculated by means of two complementary methods: one based on well-known renormalization techniques and the other based on determining the inflection point of the percolation function curves. A comparison of the results obtained by these two methods has been performed. The study includes the use of finite-size scaling theory to extrapolate numerical results towards the thermodynamic limit. The effect of jamming due to dimers is also established. Finally, the critical exponents nu, beta and gamma have been obtained and values compared with numerical results and expected theoretical estimations. The present results show agreement and even improvement (in the case of gamma) with respect to some numeric values available in the literature. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.