Infinite cascades of phase transitions in the classical Ising chain.

Abstract

We report exact results on one of the best studied models in statistical physics: the classical antiferromagnetic Ising chain in a magnetic field. We show that the model possesses an infinite cascade of thermal phase transitions (also known as disorder lines or geometric phase transitions). The phase transition is signaled by a change of asymptotic behavior of the nonlocal string-string correlation functions when their monotonic decay becomes modulated by incommensurate oscillations. The transitions occur for rarefied (m-periodic) strings with arbitrary odd m. We propose a duality transformation which maps the Ising chain onto the m-leg Ising tube with nearest-neighbor couplings along the legs and the plaquette four-spin interactions of adjacent legs. Then the m-string correlation functions of the Ising chain are mapped onto the two-point spin-spin correlation functions along the legs of the m-leg tube. We trace the origin of these cascades of phase transitions to the lines of the Lee-Yang zeros of the Ising chain in m-periodic complex magnetic field, allowing us to relate these zeros to the observable (and potentially measurable) quantities.