文章基本信息

标题：Fisher Zeros and Correlation Decay in the Ising Model
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作者：Jingcheng Liu ; Alistair Sinclair ; Piyush Srivastava 等
期刊名称：LIPIcs : Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics
电子版ISSN：1868-8969
出版年度：2018
卷号：124
页码：1-8
DOI：10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.55
出版社：Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik
摘要：The Ising model originated in statistical physics as a means of studying phase transitions in magnets, and has been the object of intensive study for almost a century. Combinatorially, it can be viewed as a natural distribution over cuts in a graph, and it has also been widely studied in computer science, especially in the context of approximate counting and sampling. In this paper, we study the complex zeros of the partition function of the Ising model, viewed as a polynomial in the "interaction parameter"; these are known as Fisher zeros in light of their introduction by Fisher in 1965. While the zeros of the partition function as a polynomial in the "field" parameter have been extensively studied since the classical work of Lee and Yang, comparatively little is known about Fisher zeros. Our main result shows that the zero-field Ising model has no Fisher zeros in a complex neighborhood of the entire region of parameters where the model exhibits correlation decay. In addition to shedding light on Fisher zeros themselves, this result also establishes a formal connection between two distinct notions of phase transition for the Ising model: the absence of complex zeros (analyticity of the free energy, or the logarithm of the partition function) and decay of correlations with distance. We also discuss the consequences of our result for efficient deterministic approximation of the partition function. Our proof relies heavily on algorithmic techniques, notably Weitz's self-avoiding walk tree, and as such belongs to a growing body of work that uses algorithmic methods to resolve classical questions in statistical physics.
关键词：Ising model; zeros of polynomials; partition functions; approximate counting; phase transitions