Cluster expansion in the canonical ensemble (Q694991)

The quantitative prediction of macroscopic properties of matter through its microscopic structure has been a main challenge for statistical mechanics. In the literature the main idea is to describe all possible interactions among the particles of the non-ideal gas by representing them as linear graphs; this led to a main tool in statistical mechanics, namely the cluster expansion method. This method requires to express the pressure in a power series of the activity, invert it and replace it in the equation for the pressure. This road (an expansion of the free energy versus the density) seems to be a direct and natural way: take the density \(\rho\) instead of the activity as order parameter. However, the authors came to this problem from other directions and found that the problem is not only solvable but easy. In Section 5.1 we can see the origin of the proposed approach; it's closely related to the basic property of the cluster expansion; only chains of graphs (clusters) which survive the expansion are made of ``incompatible'' graphs. The proposed approach opens the way to attack several other problems in physics.