Lower bounds for the ground-state degeneracies of frustrated systems on fractal lattices

Abstract

The total number of ground states for nearest-neighbor-interaction Ising systems with frustrations, defined on hierarchical lattices, is investigated. A simple method is presented, which allows one to factorize the ground-state degeneracy, at a given hierarchy level n, in terms of contributions due to all hierarchy levels. Such a method may yield the exact ground-state degeneracy of uniformly frustrated systems, whereas it works as an approximation for randomly frustrated models. In the latter cases, it is demonstrated that such an approximation yields lower-bound estimates for the ground-state degeneracies.