On the absence of ferromagnetism in typical 2D ferromagnets.pdf

a r X i v : m a t h - p h / 0 6 0 8 0 0 9 v 3 7 D e c 2 0 0 6 To appear in Communications in Mathematical Physics On the absence of ferromagnetism in typical 2D ferromagnets Marek Biskup 1 , Lincoln Chayes 1 , Steven A. Kivelson 2 1 Department of Mathematics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1555, U.S.A. 2 Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4045, U.S.A. Abstract: We consider the Ising systems in d dimensions with nearest-neighbor fer- romagnetic interactions and long-range repulsive (antiferromagnetic) interactions that decay with power s of the distance. The physical context of such models is discussed; primarily this is d = 2 and s = 3 where, at long distances, genuine magnetic interac- tions between genuine magnetic dipoles are of this form. We prove that when the power of decay lies above d and does not exceed d + 1, then for all temperatures the sponta- neous magnetization is zero. In contrast, we also show that for powers exceeding d+ 1 (with d ≥ 2) magnetic order can occur. 1. Introduction While most of our knowledge of statistical mechanics is derived from studies of model problems with short-range forces, in nature interactions more often fall off only in pro- portion to an inverse power of the distance, U(r) ～ 1/rs. This includes systems inter- acting via Coulomb forces (s = 1), dipolar interactions (s = 3) as well as interactions caused by collective effects such as strain induced interactions in solids or the effective entropic interactions (analogous to Casimir forces) in lipid films. When the interac- tions are sufficiently long-range, i.e., when s ≤ d where d is the spatial dimension, the very definition of the thermodynamic limit is different than for short-ranged mod- els. However, even when s d there can be qualitatively new, or at least unexpected, phenomena, cf, e.g., [2–4, 29]. In the present paper we study a class of systems with long-range forces; namely, the Ising models on Z d , d ≥ 1, which are defined by the (f