Magnetic critical behavior of the Ising model on fractal structures

The critical temperature and the set of critical exponents (β,γ,ν) of the Ising model on a fractal structure, namely the Sierpiński carpet, are calculated from a Monte Carlo simulation based on the Wolff algorithm together with the histogram method and finite-size scaling. Both cases of periodic boundary conditions and free edges are investigated. The calculations have been done up to the seventh iteration step of the fractal structure. The results show that, although the structure is not translationally invariant, the scaling behavior of thermodynamical quantities is conserved, which gives a meaning to the finite-size analysis. Although some discrepancies in the values of the critical exponents occur between periodic boundary conditions and free edges, the effective dimension obtained through the Rushbrooke and Josephson's scaling law have the same value in both cases. This value is slightly but significantly different from the fractal dimension.