Three-state, steady-state Ising systems: Monte Carlo and Bragg-Williams treatments

  1. Terrell L. Hill and
  2. Yi-Der Chen
  1. Laboratory of Molecular Biology, National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism and Digestive Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20205

Abstract

In two earlier papers, the steady-state critical and phase-transition properties of a lattice of three-state enzyme molecules were studied by using the “closed” Bragg-Williams (BW), or mean field, approximation. The “open” BW and Monte Carlo methods are applied to the same problem in this paper by using finite lattices. The open BW treatment provides a way of locating the cut across a van der Waals type of loop encountered in a phase transition in the closed BW system. Thermodynamic-like methods cannot be used for this purpose as they can with two-state, steady-state systems.

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