Paper 4, Section II, C
The Ising model consists of particles, labelled by , arranged on a -dimensional Euclidean lattice with periodic boundary conditions. Each particle has spin up , or down , and the energy in the presence of a magnetic field is
where is a constant and indicates that the second sum is over each pair of nearest neighbours (every particle has nearest neighbours). Let , where is the temperature.
(i) Express the average spin per particle, , in terms of the canonical partition function .
(ii) Show that in the mean-field approximation
where is a single-particle partition function, is an effective magnetic field which you should find in terms of and , and is a prefactor which you should also evaluate.
(iii) Deduce an equation that determines for general values of and temperature . Without attempting to solve for explicitly, discuss how the behaviour of the system depends on temperature when , deriving an expression for the critical temperature and explaining its significance.
(iv) Comment briefly on whether the results obtained using the mean-field approximation for are consistent with an expression for the free energy of the form
where and are positive constants.