We consider the contour representation of the infinite volume Ising model at low temperature. Fix a subset V of Z^d, and a (large) N such that calling G_{N,V} the set of contours of length at least N intersecting V, there are in average one contour in G_{N,V} under the infinite volume "plus" measure. We find bounds on the total variation distance between the law of the contours of lenght at least N intersecting V under the "plus" measure and a Poisson process. The proof builds on the Chen-Stein method as presented by Arratia, Goldstein and Gordon. The control of the correlations is obtained through the loss-network space-time representation of contours due to Fernandez, Ferrari and Garcia.
In the paper the Ising model with competing $J_1$ and $J_2$ interactions with spin values $\pm 1$, on a Cayley tree of order 2 (with 3 neighbors) is considered . We study the structure of the ground states and verify the Peierls condition for the model. Our second result gives description of Gibbs measures for ferromagnetic Ising model with $J_1<0$ and $J_2=0$, using a contour argument which we also develop in the paper. By the argument we also study Gibbs measures for a natural generalization of the Ising model. We discuss some open problems and state several conjectures.\
Following Fröhlich and Spencer, we study one dimensional Ising spin systems with ferromagnetic, long range interactions which decay as $|x-y|^{-2+α}$, $0\leq α\leq 1/2$. We introduce a geometric description of the spin configurations in terms of triangles which play the role of contours and for which we establish Peierls bounds. This in particular yields a direct proof of the well known result by Dyson about phase transitions at low temperatures.
Contours associated to many interesting low-temperature statistical mechanics models (2D Ising model, (2+1)D SOS interface model, etc) can be described as self-interacting and self-avoiding walks on $\mathbb Z^2$. When the model is defined in a finite box, the presence of the boundary induces an interaction, that can turn out to be attractive, between the contour and the boundary of the box. On the other hand, the contour cannot cross the boundary, so it feels entropic repulsion from it. In various situations of interest a crucial technical problem is to prove that entropic repulsion prevails …
A $d$-dimensional Ising model on a lattice torus is considered. As the size $n$ of the lattice tends to infinity, a Poisson approximation is given for the distribution of the number of copies in the lattice of any given local configuration, provided the magnetic field $a=a(n)$ tends to $-\infty$ and the pair potential $b$ remains fixed. Using the Stein-Chen method, a bound is given for the total variation error in the ferromagnetic case.
A $d$-dimensional ferromagnetic Ising model on a lattice torus is considered. As the size of the lattice tends to infinity, two conditions ensuring a Poisson approximation for the distribution of the number of occurrences in the lattice of any given local configuration are suggested. The proof builds on the Stein--Chen method. The rate of the Poisson approximation and the speed of convergence to it are defined and make sense for the model. Thus, the two sufficient conditions are traduced in terms of the magnetic field and the pair potential. In particular, the Poisson approximation holds even …
We prove absence of infinite clusters and contours in a class of critical constrained percolation models on the square lattice. The percolation configuration is assumed to satisfy certain hard local constraints, but only weak symmetry and ergodicity conditions are imposed on its law. The proofs use new combinatorial techniques exploiting planar duality. Applications include absence of infinite clusters of diagonal edges for critical dimer models on the square-octagon lattice, as well as absence of infinite contours and infinite clusters for critical XOR Ising models on the square grid. We also…
We find by simulation that the interfaces in the exclusive-or (XOR) of two independent 2D Ising spin configurations at the critical temperature form an ensemble of loops that have the same distribution as the contour lines of the Gaussian free field, but with the heights of the contours spaced \sqrt{2} times as far apart as they are for the conformal loop ensemble CLE_4 or the double dimer model on the square lattice. For domains with boundary, various natural boundary conditions for the two Ising models correspond to certain boundary heights for the Gaussian free field.
The XOR-Ising model on a graph consists of random spin configurations on vertices of the graph obtained by taking the product at each vertex of the spins of two independent Ising models. In this paper, we explicitly relate loop configurations of the XOR-Ising model and those of a dimer model living on a decorated, bipartite version of the Ising graph. This result is proved for graphs embedded in compact surfaces of genus g. Using this fact, we then prove that XOR-Ising loops have the same law as level lines of the height function of this bipartite dimer model. At criticality, the height functi…
We present a probabilistic approach for the study of systems with exclusions, in the regime traditionally studied via cluster-expansion methods. In this paper we focus on its application for the gases of Peierls contours found in the study of the Ising model at low temperatures, but most of the results are general. We realize the equilibrium measure as the invariant measure of a loss-network process whose existence is ensured by a subcriticality condition of a dominant branching process. In this regime, the approach yields, besides existence and uniqueness of the measure, properties such as ex…
We investigate the Gibbs-measures of ferromagnetically coupled continuous spins in double-well potentials subjected to a random field (our specific example being the $ϕ^4$ theory), showing ferromagnetic ordering in $d\geq 3$ dimensions for weak disorder and large energy barriers. We map the random continuous spin distributions to distributions for an Ising-spin system by means of a single-site coarse-graining method described by local transition kernels. We derive a contour- representation for them with notably positive contour activities and prove their Gibbsianness. This representation is sh…
We continue our study of exponential law for occurrences and returns of patterns in the context of Gibbsian random fields. For the low temperature plus phase of the Ising model, we prove exponential laws with error bounds for occurrence, return, waiting and matching times. Moreover we obtain a Poisson law for the number of occurrences of large cylindrical events and a Gumbel law for the maximal overlap between two independent copies. As a by-product, we derive precise fluctuation results for the logarithm of waiting and return times. The main technical tool we use, in order to control mixing, …
We considerably improve upon the recent result of Martinelli and Toninelli on the mixing time of Glauber dynamics for the 2D Ising model in a box of side $L$ at low temperature and with random boundary conditions whose distribution $P$ stochastically dominates the extremal plus phase. An important special case is when $P$ is concentrated on the homogeneous all-plus configuration, where the mixing time $T_{mix}$ is conjectured to be polynomial in $L$. In [MT] it was shown that for a large enough inverse-temperature $β$ and any $ε>0$ there exists $c=c(β,ε)$ such that $\lim_{L\to\infty}P(T_{mix}\…
We consider a Glauber dynamics associated with the Ising model on a large two-dimensional box with with minus boundary conditions and in the limit of a vanishing positive external magnetic field. The volume of this box increases quadratically in the inverse of the magnetic field. We show that at subcritical temperature and for a large class of starting measures, including measures that are supported by configurations with macroscopic plus-spin droplets, the system rapidly relaxes to some metastable equilibrium ---with typical configurations made of microscopic plus-phase droplets in a sea of m…
