The Two-Dimensional Ising Model
Barry M. McCoy, Tai Tsun Wu
Understanding the relationship which integrable (solvable) models, all of which possess very special symmetry properties, have with the generic nonintegrable models that are used to describe real experiments, which do not have the symmetry properties, is one of the most fundamental open questions in both statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.The importance of the two-dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field is that it is the simplest system where this relationship may be concretely studied.We here review the advances made in this study, and concentrate on the magnetic susceptibility which has revealed an unexpected natural boundary phenomenon.When this is combined with the Fermionic representations of conformal characters, it is suggested that the scaling theory, which smoothly connects the lattice with the correlation length scale, may be incomplete for H = 0.
Harvard University Press eBooks•Dec 31, 1973•1,332 citations