Abstract We take advantage of the simplifications made possible by assuming the system to be infinite from the beginning, to study some exactly solvable models in statistical mechanics. (1) For fermi lattice systems with quadratic hamiltonians the unifying concept of our treatment is a precise formulation of the idea of a linear system. This concept makes it possible to define a dynamical matrix which incorporates all the information one needs for equilibrium and non‐equilibrium problems. As an example, we consider the alternating X Y chain. Furthermore we pay some attention to ergodicity, pointing out the similarity to the infinite harmonic crystal. (2) For molecular field models, including the BCS model, the method is to consider an arbitrary extremal homogeneous state, to construct the dynamics in the representation determined by that state, and then to use the KMS condition to single out the equilibrium state of the infinite system. A synthesis of these methods – (1) and (2) – enables us to give a new simple treatment of the BCS model and a direct analysis of its mathematical structure. In addition we show the equivalence of Kac and van der Waals (spin) systems in the so‐called van der Waals limit. Finally we indicate briefly how to deal with molecular field models with polynomial and more general interactions.
Many physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger than microscopic molecular collision scales and can be considered as in local thermal equilibrium. In this paper we show that any classical statistical system in local thermal equilibrium has an emergent supersymmetry at low energies. We use the framework of non-equilibrium effective field theory for quantum many-body systems defined on a closed time path contour and consider its classical limit. Unitarity of time evolution requires introducing anti-commuting degrees of freedom and BRST symmetry which survive in the classical limit. The local equilibrium is realized through a Z2 dynamical KMS symmetry. We show that supersymmetry is equivalent to the combination of BRST and a specific consequence of the dynamical KMS symmetry, to which we refer as the special dynamical KMS condition. In particular, we prove a theorem stating that a system satisfying the special dynamical KMS condition is always supersymmetrizable. We discuss a number of examples explicitly, including model A for dynamical critical phenomena, a hydrodynamic theory of nonlinear diffusion, and fluctuating hydrodynamics for relativistic charged fluids.
We study how thermal equilibrium states of infinite fermionic lattices respond to perturbations of the Hamiltonian. Our main result concerns extensive perturbations of a chosen KMS state. We show that exponential decay of correlations and exponential local indistinguishability under the extensive perturbation yield stretched-exponential decay of correlations for the perturbed state. Neither the initial nor the perturbed state is required to be unique, allowing stability to be studied in the presence of phase coexistence. Our approach uses Quantum Belief Propagation (QBP), which we establish directly on the underlying
C∗-algebra. Combining QBP with Lieb--Robinson bounds, we show implications between decay of correlations, the principle that local perturbations perturb locally, and local indistinguishability, closing the cycle for perturbations of the tracial state under the stated decay, support and uniformity assumptions. For extensive perturbations under uniform clustering conditions, we also obtain a differentiable path of local equilibrium expectations and bound their change linearly in the interaction norm of the perturbation.