The Origin of Mean-Field Behavior in an Elastic Ising Model

Abstract

Simple elastic models of spin-crossover compounds are known empirically to exhibit classical critical behavior. We demonstrate how the long-ranged interactions responsible for this behavior arise naturally upon integrating out mechanical fluctuations of such a model. A mean field theory applied to the resulting effective Hamiltonian quantitatively accounts for both thermodynamics and kinetics observed in computer simulations, including a barrier to magnetization reversal that grows extensively with system size. For nanocrystals, which break translational symmetry, a straightforward extension of mean field theory yields similarly accurate results.

Main text: 9 pages, 10 figures; Supplemental Material: 11 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Statistical mechanics and dynamics of solvable models with long-range interactions
• Realization of the mean-field universality class in spin-crossover materials
• Monte Carlo simulation of pressure-induced phase transitions in spin-crossover materials

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Remembering the work of Phillip L. Geissler: A coda to his scientific trajectory