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arXiv:2511.01646 · Entropy

Exact Combinatorial Density of States for the Critical 1D Ising Model

Bastian Castorene, Francisco J. Peña, Martin HvE Groves, Patricio Vargas

cond-mat.stat-mechquant-phSubmitted Nov 3, 2025• Announced Nov 4, 2025• 1 citation• Revised Apr 26, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Nov 3, 2025v2 · Apr 26, 2026
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Abstract

This work presents an exact microcanonical combinatorial analysis of the one-dimensional antiferromagnetic Ising model. At the primary ground-state level crossing $B/J=2$, degeneracies follow the Fibonacci and Lucas sequences for open chains and periodic rings, respectively. We extend this framework to the complete excitation spectrum, demonstrating that the density of states is constructed from topological defects governed by linear Diophantine equations and $p$-fold Fibonacci convolutions. Open boundaries act as fractional defects, densifying the chain spectrum into energy steps of $2J$, whereas the closed ring remains quantized in units of $4J$. Notably, this exact topological counting exposes non-trivial spectral gaps near the fully polarized limit, strictly forbidding the penultimate macroscopic energy levels in both topologies. Through the transfer matrix formalism, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the critical degeneracies at all energy levels. These results provide a rigorous analytical foundation for extracting exact residual entropies and exposing the intrinsic number-theoretic architecture of quantum critical manifolds.

Journal reference
Entropy 28, 821 (2026)
DOI
10.3390/e28070821
Comments
13 pages, 4 Fig

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Under an appropriate symmetric extensive bipartition in a one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase, a bulk critical-entanglement spectrum can be obtained, resembling the excitation spectrum of the critical point separating the SPT phase from the trivial (vacuum) state. Such a critical point is beyond the standard Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm for symmetry-breaking phase transitions. For the S=1S=1S=1 SPT (Haldane) phase with the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki exact wave function, the resulting critical-entanglement spectrum has a residual entropy per lattice site sr=0.67602{s}_{r}=0.67602sr​=0.67602, showing a delocalized version of the edge excitations in the SPT phase. From the wave function corresponding to the lowest entanglement energy level, the central charge of the critical point can be extracted $c\ensuremath{\approx}1.01\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.01$. The critical theory can be identified as the same effective field theory as the spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain or the spin-1/2 Haldane-Shastry model with inverse-square long-range interaction.