Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2021 iii Paper 303 1 e i Solution 2026-09-28
This is the Blume–Capel model. In the mean-field approximation, write and replaceBecause every site has coordination number , the resulting energy isThe one-site partition function is thereforeWith , the mean-field partition function is . Taking gives
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2024 iii Paper 343 2 a Solution 2026-09-28
Write the spin-one-half Heisenberg antiferromagnet ason a bipartite lattice of coordination number . A one-spin density operator is , where is its Bloch vector and . In a two-sublattice product state,The minimum is , attained by pure antiparallel Bloch vectors, so the minimizing product state is a Néel state. In the limit this mean-field approximation becomes exact and the ground-state energy per bond is therefore
The phrase “energy density” requires a coupling convention. For the unscaled Hamiltonian above, every site belongs to bonds andwhich diverges as . With the standard Kac normalizationthe finite energy density isIf the convention divides by the spatial dimension instead, the answer is per site. A Hamiltonian written with rather than multiplies all these energies by four.