Coarse graining and large-\(N\) behavior of the \(d\)-dimensional \(N\)-clock model (Q2244862)

Summary: We study the asymptotic behavior of the \(N\)-clock model, a nearest neighbors ferromagnetic spin model on the \(d\)-dimensional cubic \(\varepsilon\)-lattice in which the spin field is constrained to take values in a discretization \(\mathcal{S}_N\) of the unit circle \(\mathbb{S}^1\) consisting of \(N\) equispaced points. Our \(\varGamma\)-convergence analysis consists of two steps: we first fix \(N\) and let the lattice spacing \(\varepsilon \to 0\), obtaining an interface energy in the continuum defined on piecewise constant spin fields with values in \(\mathcal{S}_N\); at a second stage, we let \(N \to +\infty \). The final result of this two-step limit process is an anisotropic total variation of \(\mathbb{S}^1\)-valued vector fields of bounded variation.