Detecting Classical Phase Transitions with Renyi Mutual Information

Abstract

By developing a method to represent the Renyi entropies via a replica-trick on classical statistical mechanical systems, we introduce a procedure to calculate the Renyi Mutual Information in any Monte Carlo simulation. Through simulations on several classical models, we demonstrate that the Renyi Mutual Information can detect finite-temperature critical points, and even identify their universality class, without knowledge of an order parameter or other thermodynamic estimators. Remarkably, in addition to critical points mediated by symmetry breaking, the Renyi Mutual Information is able to detect topological vortex-unbinding transitions, as we explicitly demonstrate on simulations of the XY model.