Pecularities of Bethe-like approximations and long-range-interaction Ising models

The mean-field approximation and the Bethe approximation are two of the most often used approximations when one wants to obtain approximations of the phase diagrams and the critical temperature of lattice spin systems. Both can and have often been generalized to produce what are known as cluster mean-field and Bethe approximations. Generally, three characteristics are associated with these approximations. First, they give upper bounds to the critical temperature; second, considering larger clusters will result in better approximations; and third, the Bethe approximation is better than the corresponding mean-field approximation. We show what we believe to be a rather surprising result that, for one-dimensional Ising models with algebraically decaying interactions falling off slowly enough, the Bethe cluster approximations violate all three of these characteristics.