Effective Field Methods for Magnetic Systems

The self-consistency conditions inherent in the mean-field approximation are extended to take into account some pair correlations. Ii is shown that this extension is systematically improvable and applicable to the spin systems with short-range interactions in the entire temperature region. With two correlations included and the renormalization-group ideas implemented, the critical properties of the Ising model are satisfactorily revealed. Moreover, the improved estimates of the thermodynamical quantities for the quantum linear XY model from the finite-size calculations are found down to very low temperatures.