Gonihedric (and Fuki-Nuke) order

Abstract

A 3D Ising model with a purely plaquette, 4-spin interaction displays a planar flip symmetry intermediate between a global and a gauge symmetry and as a consequence has a highly degenerate low temperature phase and no standard magnetic order parameter. This plaquette Hamiltonian is a particular case of a family of 3D gonihedric Ising models defined by Savvidy and Wegner. An anisotropic variant of the purely plaquette gonihedric model, originally discussed as the ‘Fuki-Nuke’ model by Suzuki, is non-trivially equivalent to a stack of 2D Ising models, each of which can magnetize independently at the phase transition point. Consideration of this anisotropic model suggests that a suitable order parameter in the isotropic case may also be constructed using a form of planar magnetization, in which nearest neighbour correlators 〈σiσj〉 summed over planes replace a sum over spin values 〈σi〉. We conduct Monte-Carlo simulations to investigate this and related candidate order parameters in a toy model of gonihedric ground states, the Fuki-Nuke model and the isotropic plaquette gonihedric model itself.