Approximation Algorithms for Two-State Anti-Ferromagnetic Spin Systems on Bounded Degree Graphs

We show that for the anti-ferromagnetic Ising model on the Bethe lattice, weak spatial mixing implies strong spatial mixing. As a by-product of our analysis, we obtain what is to the best of our knowledge the first rigorous proof of the uniqueness threshold for the anti-ferromagnetic Ising model (with non-zero external field) on the Bethe lattice. Following a method due to Weitz [ 15 ], we then use the equivalence between weak and strong spatial mixing to give a deterministic fully polynomial time approximation scheme for the partition function of the anti-ferromagnetic Ising model with arbitrary field on graphs of degree at most d , throughout the uniqueness region of the Gibbs measure on the infinite d -regular tree. By a standard correspondence, our results translate to arbitrary two-state anti-ferromagnetic spin systems with soft constraints. Subsequent to a preliminary version of this paper, Sly and Sun [ 13 ] have shown that our results are optimal in the sense that, under standard complexity theoretic assumptions, there does not exist a fully polynomial time approximation scheme for the partition function of such spin systems on graphs of maximum degree d for parameters outside the uniqueness region. Taken together, the results of [ 13 ] and of this paper therefore indicate a tight relationship between complexity theory and phase transition phenomena in two-state anti-ferromagnetic spin systems.