Ising boundary condition 2026-10-14
A fixed Ising boundary condition pins the Ising spins on a specified boundary, leaving the interior distributed with the original interaction weights. The boundary can be the inner graph vertex boundary of a finite box, or an exterior neighboring set if that convention is explicitly chosen. Conditioning on pinned Ising spins preserves the FKG lattice condition of a ferromagnetic Ising model. The FKG inequality then makes interior expectations of increasing observables nondecreasing in the pinned boundary Ising spins.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2003 iii Paper 30 3 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
With the inner boundary specified in the PDF, the Ising boundary condition pins . Explicitly is conditioned on those Ising spins. Its partition function sums over unpinned interior Ising spins only; edges between two pinned sites contribute a constant that cancels on normalization.
Pinning coordinates preserves the FKG lattice condition, since meet in a lattice and join in a lattice still have the same pinned values. It also gives monotonicity in the pins. For any increasing observable , positive association of random variables with an unpinned Ising spin givesBoth conditional probabilities are positive. The same inequality holds after other Ising spins have been pinned. Changing pins one at a time proves stochastic domination of the measures as increases.
Now let and take an increasing observable depending on a fixed set inside the smaller box. Given the Ising spins on , the larger-box measure induces precisely the smaller-box interior law with those boundary values: nearest-neighbor interactions cannot see farther once this boundary is fixed. Its conditional law is therefore between the all-zero and all-one smaller-box laws. Averaging yieldsThese are bounded monotone sequences along any increasing box exhaustion.
For every finite set , the event that all Ising spins in are one is increasing, so its probability converges in both boundary sequences. Probabilities of arbitrary finite zero/one patterns are finite inclusion-exclusion combinations of these all-one probabilities, and hence converge too. The limits are consistent finite-dimensional distributions; they define measures on and give weak convergence of probability measures in the product topology. Thus both extremal infinite-volume Ising measures exist, with below in stochastic domination. This argument proves existence even when the two limits are different.