Further investigations of the crumpling transition in dynamically triangulated random surfaces

We examine further the critical behaviour of dynamically triangulated random surfaces (DTRS) with extrinsic curvature at their second-order crumpling transition. We show that the string tension in these models may be scaling near the transition in such a way that the physical string tension is finite, unlike models containing only a Polyakov term, suggesting that one can use DTRS as a discretization of subcritical string theory. We explore the universality properties of DTRS, showing that an apparently irrelevant term can affect the phase transition. We also find that the observed phase transition persists when the surfaces are embedded in higher dimensions, contradicting the naive expectations of a saddle point expansion.