Decay of Order in Classical Many-Body Systems. I. Introduction and Formal Theory

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Abstract
In this work we briefly review the Ornstein-Zernike prediction for the decay of correlation functions, extend it to treat the decay of correlation near surfaces, and then contrast this prediction with the exactly known results for the two-dimensional Ising model. We develop the transfer-matrix approach to classical statistical mechanics in sufficient generality for its use in later papers in this series, where it is employed to derive general forms for the decay of correlation functions in Ising models away from the critical point, which provide a clear explanation of the failure of the Ornstein-Zernike theory for the two-dimensional Ising model. In particular, we show that the thermodynamic behavior of a classical system with short-range interactions reduces, when the system becomes infinite in at least one dimension, to the calculation of the largest eigenvalue of the transfer matrix. Using the Perron-Fröbenius theorem, we show that for a system infinite in no more than one dimension, an arbitrary correlation function defined on the system decays at least exponentially fast. One is able to predict whether the decay of correlation is monotone or oscillatory on the basis of the largest few eigenvalues of the transfer matrix.