Husimi-lattice solutions and the coherent-anomaly-method analysis for hard-square lattice gases

Although lattice gases composed of particles preventing up to their kth nearest neighbors from being occupied (the kNN models) have been widely investigated in the literature, the location and the universality class of the fluid-columnar transition in the 2NN model on the square lattice are still a topic of debate. Here, we present grand-canonical solutions of this model on Husimi lattices built with diagonal square lattices, with 2L(L+1) sites, for L⩽7. The systematic sequence of mean-field solutions confirms the existence of a continuous transition in this system, and extrapolations of the critical chemical potential μ_{2,c}(L) and particle density ρ_{2,c}(L) to L→∞ yield estimates of these quantities in close agreement with previous results for the 2NN model on the square lattice. To confirm the reliability of this approach, we employ it also for the 1NN model, where very accurate estimates for the critical parameters μ_{1,c} and ρ_{1,c}-for the fluid-solid transition in this model on the square lattice-are found from extrapolations of data for L⩽6. The nonclassical critical exponents for these transitions are investigated through the coherent anomaly method (CAM), which in the 1NN case yields β and ν differing by at most 6% from the expected Ising exponents. For the 2NN model, the CAM analysis is somewhat inconclusive, because the exponents sensibly depend on the value of μ_{2,c} used to calculate them. Notwithstanding, our results suggest that β and ν are considerably larger than the Ashkin-Teller exponents reported in numerical studies of the 2NN system.