Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.

Non-UMass Amherst users, please click the view more button below to purchase a copy of this dissertation from Proquest.

(Some titles may also be available free of charge in our Open Access Dissertation Collection, so please check there first.)

Conditional Gaussian fluctuations and refined asymptotics of the spin in the phase-coexistence region

Jingran Li, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

In this dissertation four results are presented on the fluctuations of the spin per site around the thermodynamic magnetization in the mean-field Blume-Capel model, a basic model in statistical mechanics. The first two results refine the main theorem in a 2010 paper by R. S. Ellis, J. Machta, and P. T. Otto published in Annals of Applied Probability 20 (2010) 2118-2161. This paper provides the first rigorous confirmation of the statistical mechanical theory of finite-size scaling for a mean-field model. The first main result studies the asymptotics of the centered, finite-size magnetization, giving its precise rate of convergence to 0 along parameter sequences lying in the phase-coexistence region and converging sufficiently slowly to either a second-order point or the tricritical point of the model. A simple inequality yields our second main result, which generalizes the main theorem in the Ellis-Machta-Otto paper by giving an upper bound on the rate of convergence to 0 of the absolute value of the difference between the finite-size magnetization and the thermodynamic magnetization. These first two results have direct relevance to the theory of finite-size scaling. They are consequences of the third main result. This is a new conditional limit theorem for the spin per site, where the conditioning allows us to focus on a neighborhood of the pure states having positive thermodynamic magnetization. The fourth main result is a conditional central limit theorem showing that the fluctuations of the spin per site are Gaussian in a neighborhood of the pure states having positive thermodynamic magnetization.

Subject Area

Mathematics|Statistics|Physics

Recommended Citation

Li, Jingran, "Conditional Gaussian fluctuations and refined asymptotics of the spin in the phase-coexistence region" (2013). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI3603111.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3603111

Share

COinS