Breaking of periodicity at positive temperatures

Abstract

We discuss a classical lattice gas model without periodic or quasiperiodic ground states. The only ground state configurations of our model are nonperiodic Thue-Morse sequences. We show that low temperature phases of such models can be ordered. In fact, we prove the existence of an ordered (nonmixing) low temperature translation invariant equilibrium state which has nonperiodic Gibbs states in its extremal decomposition.