Although the fully connected Ising model does not have a length scale, we show that the critical exponents for thermodynamic quantities such as the mean magnetization and the susceptibility can be obtained using finite size scaling with the scaling variable equal to $N$, the number of spins. Surprisingly, the mean value and the most probable value of the magnetization are found to scale differently with $N$ at the critical temperature of the infinite system, and the magnetization probability distribution is not a Gaussian, even for large $N$. Similar results inconsistent with the usual understanding of mean-field theory are found at the spinodal. We relate these results to the breakdown of hyperscaling and show that hyperscaling can be restored by increasing $N$ while holding the Ginzburg parameter rather than the temperature fixed, or by doing finite size scaling at the pseudocritical temperature where the susceptibility is a maximum for a given value of $N$. We conclude that finite size scaling for the fully connected Ising model yields different results depending on how the mean-field limit is approached.

• Received 4 April 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.90.042111