An exactly solvable ansatz for statistical mechanics models

Abstract

We propose a family of ‘exactly solvable’ probability distributions to approximate partition functions of two-dimensional statistical mechanics models. While these distributions lie strictly outside the mean-field framework, their free energies can be computed in a time that scales linearly with the system size. This construction is based on a simple but nontrivial solution to the marginal problem. We formulate two non-linear constraints on the set of locally consistent marginal probabilities that simultaneously (i) ensure the existence of a consistent global probability distribution and (ii) lead to an exact expression for the maximum global entropy.