We derive a non-local effective interfacial Hamiltonian model for short-ranged wetting phenomena using a Green's function method. The Hamiltonian is characterized by a binding potential functional and is accurate to exponentially small order in the radii of curvature of the interface and the bounding wall. The functional has an elegant diagrammatic representation in terms of planar graphs which represent different classes of tube-like fluctuations connecting the interface and wall. For the particular cases of planar, spherical and cylindrical interfacial (and wall) configurations, the binding potential functional can be evaluated exactly. More generally, the non-local functional naturally explains the origin of the effective position-dependent stiffness coefficient in the smallgradient limit.

The effect of spatial correlations on the spread of infectious diseases was investigated using a stochastic SIR (Susceptible-Infective-Recovered) model on complex networks. It was found that in addition to the reduction of the effective transmission rate, through the screening of infectives, spatial correlations may have another major effect through the enhancement of stochastic fluctuations. As a consequence large populations will have to become even larger to 'average out' significant differences from the solution of deterministic models. Furthermore, time series of the (unforced) model provide patterns of recurrent epidemics with slightly irregular periods and realistic amplitudes, suggesting that stochastic models together with complex networks of contacts may be sufficient to describe the long term dynamics of some diseases.The spatial effects were analysed quantitatively by modelling measles and pertussis, using a SEIR (Susceptible-Exposed-Infective-Recovered) model. Both the period and the spatial coherence of the epidemic peaks of pertussis are well described by the unforced model for realistic values of the parameters.

In our first paper, we showed how a non-local effective Hamiltonian for short-ranged wetting may be derived from an underlying Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson model. Here, we combine the Green's function method with standard perturbation theory to determine the general diagrammatic form of the binding potential functional beyond the double-parabola approximation for the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson bulk potential. The main influence of cubic and quartic interactions is simply to alter the coefficients of the double parabola-like zigzag diagrams and also to introduce curvature and tube-interaction corrections (also represented diagrammatically), which are of minor importance. Non-locality generates effective long-ranged many-body interfacial interactions due to the reflection of tube-like fluctuations from the wall. Alternative wall boundary conditions (with a surface field and enhancement) and the diagrammatic description of tricritical wetting are also discussed.

We extend recent studies of 3D short-ranged wetting transitions by deriving an interfacial Hamiltonian in the presence of an arbitrary external field. The binding potential functional, describing the interaction of the interface and the substrate, can still be written in a diagrammatic form, but now includes new classes of diagrams due to the coupling to the external potential, which are determined exactly. Applications to systems with long-ranged (algebraically decaying) and short-ranged (exponentially decaying) external potentials are considered at length. We show how the familiar 'sharp-kink' approximation to the binding potential emerges, and determine the corrections to this arising from interactions between bulk-like fluctuations and the external field. A connection is made with earlier local effective interfacial Hamiltonian approaches. It is shown that, for the case of an exponentially decaying potential, non-local effects have a particularly strong influence on the approach to the critical regime at second-order wetting transitions, even when they appear to be sub-dominant. This is confirmed by Monte Carlo simulation studies of a discretized version of a non-local interfacial model.