We present a general method to obtain the microcanonical solution oflattice models with long-range interactions. As an example, we apply it to the long-range Ising chain, focusing on the role ofboundary conditions. c
In a pioneer work, John Nagle has shown that an Ising chain with competing short and long-range interactions displays second and first-order phase transitions separated by a tricritical point. More recently, it has been claimed that Nagle's model provides an example of the inequivalence between canonical and microcanonical calculations. We then revisit Nagle's original solution, as well as the usual formulation of the problem in a canonical ensemble, which lead to the same results. Also, in contrast to recent claims, we show that an alternative formulation in the microcanonical ensemble, with the adequate choice of the fixed thermodynamic extensive variables, leads to equivalent thermodynamic results.
Abstract The previously developed n-vicinity method [3] allows us to calculate accurately critical values of inverse temperatures for Ising models with short-range interaction. We generalize the method to the case of long-range interactions in spin systems and obtain theoretical formulas for the inverse temperatures in terms of the spin interaction constants. The comparison of our theoretical estimates with computer simulations for the two- and three-dimensional Ising models shows that the larger the dimension of the problem the better their agreement.