Mean-field solution of the Random Field Ising Model

A happy new year to all the blog readers out there!

Today I will discuss a classical model of a disordered system that is extremely simple to write down: The Ising model with quenched (i.e. time-invariant) local random fields.
This model, also dubbed the Random-Field Ising Model (RFIM), is highly non-trivial. Above two dimensions, depending on the strength of the local random fields, it exhibits a phase transition between an ordered (ferromagnetic) and a disordered (paramagnetic) phase. When applying an additional homogeneous time-varying magnetic field, the local random fields prevent some regions from flipping. This leads to interesting phenomena like avalanches and hysteresis. The avalanche sizes, and the shape of the hysteresis loop, vary depending on the location in the phase diagram. Experimentally, this phenomenology – including the disorder-induced phase transition, avalanches, and hysteresis – describes very well e.g. helium condensation in disordered silica aerogels.

In this blog post, I will discuss the solution of the RFIM in the fully connected limit. This means that the ferromagnetic interaction between any two spins, no matter how far apart, has the same strength. This limit, also called the mean-field limit, is supposed to describe the model accurately for a sufficiently high spatial dimension. Just how high is “sufficient” is still a matter of debate – it may be above four dimensions, above six dimensions, or only when the dimension tends to infinity. Nevertheless, the mean-field limit already captures some of the interesting RFIM phenomenology, including the ordered-disordered phase transition. This is what I will discuss in this blog post. I will follow closely the original paper by T. Schneider and E. Pytte from 1977, but I’ve tried to extend it in many places, in order to make the calculations easier to follow.