Theory of Toeplitz Determinants and the Spin Correlations of the Two-Dimensional Ising Model. I

We study in detail the asymptotic behavior, for large separations, of the correlation between two spins in the case of the two-dimensional Ising model without magnetic field. In the limit of infinite separation, this correlation is equal to the square of the spontaneous magnetization per spin. This paper is devoted to answering the question how, for fixed temperature, the correlation approaches this limiting value. The investigation is restricted to the situation where the two spins under consideration lie on the same row of the two-dimensional lattice. There are three distinct cases where the fixed temperature is above, below, or equal to the critical temperature or the Curie temperature. In the first two cases, the limiting value is approached exponentially as a function of the separation, while at the critical temperature the correlation behaves asymptotically as the inverse fourth root of the separation. In this paper, we evaluate exactly the first four terms of the asymptotic expansion in the first case, the first three terms in the second case, and the coefficients of the terms proportional to the - and the -94 powers of the separation in the third case. All these results are obtained by first expressing the correlation as a Toeplitz determinant, and the method used is capable of giving in principle the entire asymptotic expansion for large classes of such determinants, when the size of the determinant approaches infinity. The explicit results for the two-dimensional Ising model also serve as an example where the prescription of summing the leading terms, or the most divergent terms, fails.