Coupled Ising-Potts Model: Rich Sets of Critical Temperatures and Translation-Invariant Gibbs Measures

Abstract: We consider a coupled Ising-Potts model on Cayley trees of order $ k \geq 2 $. This model involves spin vectors $ (s, \sigma) $, and generalizes both the Ising and Potts models by incorporating interactions between two types of spins: $s = \pm 1$ and $\sigma = 1, \dots, q$. It is applicable to a wide range of systems, including multicomponent alloys, spin glasses, biological systems, networks, and social models. In this paper, we find some translation-invariant splitting Gibbs measures (TISGMs) and show, for $k\geq 2$, that at sufficiently low temperatures, the number of such measures is at least $2^{q}+1$. This is not an exact upper bound; for $k=2$ and $q=5$, we demonstrate that the number of TISGMs reaches the exact bound of 335, which is much larger than $2^5+1=33$. We prove, for $q=5$ that there are 12 critical temperatures at which the number of TISGMs changes, and we provide the exact number of TISGMs for each intermediate temperature. Additionally, we identify temperature regions where three TISGMs, close to the free measure, are either extreme or non-extreme among all Gibbs measures. We also show that the coupled Ising-Potts model exhibits properties absent in the individual Ising and Potts models. In particular, we observe the following new phenomena: 1. In both the Ising and Potts models, if a Gibbs measure exists at some temperature $T_0$, then it exists for all $T<T_0$. However, in the coupled Ising-Potts model, some TISGMs may only exist at intermediate temperatures (neither very low nor very high). 2. The 5-state Potts model has three critical temperatures and up to 31 TISGMs. We show that for $q=5$, the coupled Ising-Potts model has four times as many critical temperatures and approximately 11 times as many TISGMs. Thus, our model modifies the phase structure more rapidly and exhibits a significantly richer class of splitting Gibbs measures.