A simple rederivation of Onsager's solution of the 2D Ising model using experimental mathematics (Q666890)

The Onsager solution of the 2D Ising model in zero magnetic field revolutionized our understanding of phase transitions and critical phenomena. The exact solutions of the 2D Ising model in the presence of a magnetic field and the 3D Ising model in a zero magnetic field are still outstanding open questions to date. \par In this paper, the authors recover the Onsager solution by using experimental mathematics. The main idea of their method is that i) the determination of the closed form of the free energy of the 2D Ising model (in zero magnetic field) can be reformulated as a problem of computing the combinatorial Ising polynomials; ii) the first few Ising polynomials can be explicitly computed by multiplying the transfer matrices and taking the trace for finite-size systems; iii) with the help of the Kramers-Wannier duality, it is possible to guess the coefficients of an infinite series by looking at the first few coefficients of the (transformed) Ising polynomials, which leads to a closed form of the free energy. The method presented in this paper could be useful for physicists with an interest in exploring exact solutions of classical statistical models.