Pure phases of the ferromagnetic Potts model with $q$ states on the Cayley tree of order three
Abstract
One of the main issues in statistical mechanics is the phase transition phenomenon. It happens when there are at least two distinct Gibbs measures in the model. It is known that the ferromagnetic Potts model with $q$ states possesses, at sufficiently low temperatures, at most $2^{q}-1$ translation-invariant splitting Gibbs measures. For continuous Hamiltonians, in the space of probability measures, the Gibbs measures form a non-empty, convex, compact set. Extremal measures, which corresponds to the extreme points of this set, determines pure phases. We study the extremality of the translation-invariant splitting Gibbs measures for the ferromagnetic $q$-state Potts model on the Cayley tree of order three. We define the regions where the translation-invariant Gibbs measures for this model are extreme or not. We reduce description of Gibbs measures to solving a non-linear functional equation, each solution of which corresponds to one Gibbs measure.