Entropy of fully packed rigid rods on generalized Husimi trees: A route to the square-lattice limit

Although hard rigid rods (k-mers) defined on the square lattice have been widely studied in the literature, their entropy per site, s(k), in the full-packing limit is only known exactly for dimers (k=2) and numerically for trimers (k=3). Here, we investigate this entropy for rods with k≤7, by defining and solving them on Husimi lattices built with diagonal and regular square-lattice clusters of effective lateral size L, where L defines the level of approximation to the square lattice. Due to an L-parity effect, by increasing L we obtain two systematic sequences of values for the entropies s_{L}(k) for each type of cluster, whose extrapolations to L→∞ provide estimates of these entropies for the square lattice. For dimers, our estimates for s(2) differ from the exact result by only 0.03%, while that for s(3) differs from best available estimates by 3%. In this paper, we also obtain a new estimate for s(4). For larger k, we find that the extrapolated results from the Husimi tree calculations do not lie between the lower and upper bounds established in the literature for s(k). In fact, we observe that, to obtain reliable estimates for these entropies, we should deal with levels L that increase with k. However, it is very challenging computationally to advance to solve the problem for large values of L and for large rods. In addition, the exact calculations on the generalized Husimi trees provide strong evidence for the fully packed phase to be disordered for k≥4, in contrast to the results for the Bethe lattice wherein it is nematic.