Ising ferromagnets and antiferromagnets in an imaginary magnetic field

Abstract

We study classical Ising spin-1 2 models on the 2D square lattice with ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor interactions, under the effect of a pure imaginary magnetic field. The complex Boltzmann weights of spin configurations cannot be interpreted as a probability distribution which prevents from application of standard statistical algorithms. In this work, the mapping of the Ising spin models under consideration onto symmetric vertex models leads to real (positive or negative) Boltzmann weights. This enables us to apply accurate numerical methods based on the renormalization of the density matrix, namely the corner transfer matrix renormalization group and the higher-order tensor renormalization group. For the 2D antiferromagnet, varying the imaginary magnetic field we calculate with a high accuracy the curve of critical points related to the symmetry breaking of magnetizations on the interwoven sublattices. The critical exponent β and the anomaly number c are shown to be constant along the critical line, equal to their values β = 1 8 and c = 1 2 for the 2D Ising in a zero magnetic field. As concerns the 2D ferromagnet, the free energy turns out to be well defined for any temperature. On the other hand, a "stability" border of first-order transition temperatures below which the thermodynamic limit of the magnetization per spin is ill-defined (it varies chaotically with the size of the system) is determined as a function of the imaginary magnetic field by using two different approaches.