This two-volume work provides a comprehensive study of the statistical mechanics of lattice models. It introduces readers to the main topics and the theory of phase transitions, building on a firm mathematical and physical basis. Volume 1 contains an account of mean-field and cluster variation methods successfully used in many applications in solid-state physics and theoretical chemistry, as well as an account of exact results for the Ising and six-vertex models and those derivable by transformation methods.

Most of the interesting and difficult problems in statistical mechanics arise when the constituent particles of the system interact with each other with pair or multipartiele energies. The types of behaviour which occur in systems because of these interactions are referred to as cooperative phenomena giving rise in many cases to phase transitions. This book and its companion volume (Lavis and Bell 1999, referred to in the text simply as Volume 1) are princi pally concerned with phase transitions in lattice systems. Due mainly to the insights gained from scaling theory and renormalization...