Phase transitions in $q$-state clock model

Arpita Goswami, Ravi Kumar, Monikana Gope, Shaon Sahoo

Published 2024-07-07Version 1

The $q-$state clock model, sometimes called the discrete $XY$ model, shows interesting critical phenomena. While $q=2$ corresponds to the Ising model, the $q\to\infty$ limit corresponds to the well-known $XY$ model. It is known that up to $q=4$, the two-dimensional (2D) clock model exhibits a symmetry-breaking phase transition. On the other hand, the 2D $XY$ model only shows a topological (Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless or BKT) phase transition. Interestingly, the model with finite $q$ (with $q\ge 5$) is predicted to show two different phase transitions. There are varying opinions about the actual characters of the transitions, especially the one at the lower temperature. In this work we develop mean-field theory (basic and higher order) to study the $q$-state clock model systematically. Using the mean-field theory, we show that the phase transition at the higher temperature is of the BKT type. We find that this transition temperature ($T_{BKT}$) does not depend on the $q$ values, and our basic (zeroth order) mean-field calculation shows that $T_{BKT} = 2J/k_B$, where $J$ is the nearest-neighbor exchange constant and $k_B$ is the Boltzmann constant. Our analysis shows that the other phase transition is a spontaneous symmetry-breaking (SSB) type. The corresponding transition temperature ($T_{SSB}$) is found to decrease with increasing $q$ value; it is found that $T_{SSB} \propto 1/q^2$ with a weak logarithmic correction. To better understand the model, we also perform the first-order mean-field calculations (here, the interaction between two targeted nearest neighbors is treated exactly). This calculation gives us $T_{BKT} = 1.895J/k_B$, which is slightly closer to the reported value of $0.893J/k_B$. The main advantage of this higher-order mean-field theory is that one can now estimate the spin-spin correlation, whose change in the properties indicates the phase transition.