Bounding the partition function of spin-systems (Q2500991)

Summary: With a graph \(G=(V,E)\) we associate a collection of non-negative real weights \[ \bigcup_{v\in V}\{\lambda_{i,v}:1\leq i \leq m\} \cup \bigcup_{uv \in E} \{\lambda_{ij,uv}:1\leq i \leq j \leq m\}. \] We consider the probability distribution on \(\{f:V\rightarrow\{1,\dots,m\}\}\) in which each \(f\) occurs with probability proportional to \[ \prod_{v \in V}\lambda_{f(v),v}\prod_{uv \in E}\lambda_{f(u)f(v),uv}. \] Many well-known statistical physics models, including the Ising model with an external field and the hard-core model with non-uniform activities, can be framed as such a distribution. We obtain an upper bound, independent of \(G\), for the partition function (the normalizing constant which turns the assignment of weights on \(\{f:V\rightarrow\{1,\dots,m\}\}\) into a probability distribution) in the case when \(G\) is a regular bipartite graph. This generalizes a bound obtained by \textit{D. Galvin} and \textit{P. Tetali} [DIMACS. Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science 63, 97--104 (2004; Zbl 1061.05068)] who considered the simpler weight collection \[ \{\lambda_i:1 \leq i \leq m\} \cup \{\lambda_{ij}:1 \leq i \leq j \leq m\} \] with each \(\lambda_{ij}\) either \(0\) or \(1\) and with each \(f\) chosen with probability proportional to \[ \prod_{v \in V}\lambda_{f(v)}\prod_{uv \in E}\lambda_{f(u)f(v)}. \] Our main tools are a generalization to list homomorphisms of a result of D. Galvin and P. Tetali on graph homomorphisms and a straightforward second-moment computation.