THE EQUIVALENCE OF ENSEMBLES FOR LATTICE SYSTEMS - SOME EXAMPLES AND A COUNTEREXAMPLE

We describe the problem of the equivalence of ensembles at the level of states for classical lattice systems. We discuss circumstances where the vanishing of the specific information gain of a sequence of microcanonical measures with respect to a sequence of grand canonical measures implies the equivalence of ensembles. We give a simple derivation of a criterion for the vanishing of the specific information gain in terms of thermodynamic functions. The proof uses ideas From the theory of large deviations but is self-contained. We show how the criterion works in a simple model of a paramagnet and in the Ising model of a ferromagnet in any dimension but fails in the case of the Curie-Weiss mean-field model.