Mean-Field Criticality Explained by Random Matrices Theory

How a system initially at infinite temperature responds when suddenly placed at finite temperatures is a way to check the existence of phase transitions. It has been shown in [R. da Silva, Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 34:2350061, 2023] that phase transitions are imprinted in the spectra of matrices built from time evolutions of magnetization of spin models. In this paper, we show that this method works very accurately in determining the critical temperature in the mean-field Ising model. We show that for Glauber or Metropolis dynamics, the average eigenvalue has a minimum at the critical temperature, which is corroborated by an inflection at eigenvalue dispersion at this same point. Such transition is governed by a gap in the density of eigenvalues similar to short-range spin systems. We conclude that the thermodynamics of this mean-field system can be described by the fluctuations in the spectra of Wishart matrices which suggests a direct relationship between thermodynamic fluctuations and spectral fluctuations.