Monday, 12 August 2019

thermodynamics - What new features does the Heisenberg Model have compared to the Ising Model?


Both the Ising and the Heisenberg Models describe spin lattices with interaction on first neighbors. The Hamiltonian in each case is quite similar, despite the fact of treating de spins as Ising variables (1 or -1) or as quantum operators. In the Ising case it looks like


HIsing= Ji jszi szj



where J is the coupling constant (J>0 for ferromagnet and J<0 for anti-ferromagnet), i j represents sum over first neighbors and sz is the spin in z direction. On the other hand, the Heisenberg model is


HHeisenberg= Ji jˆSiˆSj


where the only difference lies in the spins being operators. (In both cases I took away the interaction with an external field for simplicity)


My Question is: What new phenomena does treating the spins as operators brings? I can see that ˆSi . ˆSj takes account of the spin in every direction and not just z, but I can't see the physical implication of that.




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