2008/03/31 by Michael Kastner, Oliver Schnetz, Steffen Schreiber
Physics and Astronomy · #Quantum Mechanics and Non-Hermitian Physics #Quantum many-body systems #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/04/p04025
published as J. Stat. Mech. Theory Exp., P04025 (2008) · 24 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2008/04/25 · openalex publication_date 2008/04/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The relation between saddle points of the potential of a classical many-particle system and the analyticity properties of its Boltzmann entropy is studied. For finite systems, each saddle point is found to cause a nonanalyticity in the Boltzmann entropy, and the functional form of this nonanalytic term is derived for the generic case of potentials having the Morse property. With increasing system size the order of the nonanalytic term grows unboundedly, leading to an increasing differentiability of the entropy. Nonetheless, a distribution of an unboundedly growing number of saddle points may cause a phase transition in the thermodynamic limit. Analysing the contribution of the saddle points to the density of states in the thermodynamic limit, conditions on the distribution of saddle points and their curvatures are derived which are necessary for a phase transition to occur. With these results, the puzzling absence of topological signatures in the spherical model is elucidated. As further applications, the phase transitions of the mean-field XY model and the mean-field k -trigonometric model are shown to be induced by saddle points of vanishing curvature.