The Phase Transition in the Three-State Potts Model: An Analytical Analysis11The project supported by the Science Foundation of Henan Education Committee and Henan Science Committee.

Abstract

We investigate the phase transition of the three-state Potts model in an analytical approach—the generalized cumulant expansion with the effective mean field hypothesis. We find a first order phase transition in the three-dimensional three-state Potts model with ferromagnetic nearest neighbor coupling. For the model with antiferromagnetic next-to-nearest neighbor coupling, we find a first order transition when the relative strength of the -coupling is fixed to . The critical values given by this method are also in agreement with the recent high statistics Monte Carlo results.