English

Unifying all classical spin models in a Lattice Gauge Theory

High Energy Physics - Lattice 2009-07-22 v2 Statistical Mechanics Quantum Physics

Abstract

We show that the partition function of all classical spin models, including all discrete Standard Statistical Models and all abelian discrete Lattice Gauge Theories (LGTs), can be expressed as a special instance of the partition function of the 4D Z_2 LGT. In this way, all classical spin models with apparently very different features are unified in a single complete model, and a physical relation between all models is established. As applications of this result, we present a new method to do mean field theory for abelian discrete LGTs with d>3, and we show that the computation of the partition function of the 4D Z_2 LGT is a computationally hard (#P-hard) problem. We also extend our results to abelian continuous models, where we show the approximate completeness of the 4D Z_2 LGT. All results are proven using quantum information techniques.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.3583,
  title  = {Unifying all classical spin models in a Lattice Gauge Theory},
  author = {G. De las Cuevas and W. Dür and H. J. Briegel and M. A. Martin-Delgado},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.3583},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Published version. One new figure and some minor changes

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:53:41.666Z