This paper deals with the partition function of the Ising model from statistical mechanics, which is used to study phase transitions in physical systems. A special case of interest is that of the Ising model with constant energies and external field. One may consider such an Ising system as a simple graph together with vertex and edge weights. When these weights are considered indeterminates, the partition function for the constant case is a trivariate polynomialZ(G;x,y,z). This polynomial was studied with respect to its approximability by Goldberg, Jerrum and Paterson.Z(G;x,y,z) generalizes a bivariate polynomialZ(G;t,y), which was studied in by Andrén and Markström.We consider the complexity ofZ(Gt,y) andZ(G;x,y,z) in comparison to that of the Tutte polynomial, which is well known to be closely related to the Potts model in the absence of an external field. We show thatZ(G;x,y,z) is #P-hard to evaluate at all points in3, except those in an exceptional set of low dimension, even when restricted to simple graphs which are bipartite and planar. A counting version of the Exponential Time Hypothesis, #ETH, was introduced by Dell, Husfeldt and Wahlén in order to study the complexity of the Tutte polynomial. In analogy to their results, we give under #ETHa dichotomy theorem stating that evaluations ofZ(G;t,y) either take exponential time in the number of vertices ofGto compute, or can be done in polynomial time. Finally, we give an algorithm for computingZ(G;x,y,z) in polynomial time on graphs of bounded clique-width, which is not known in the case of the Tutte polynomial.
The partition function of the four-vertex model in inhomogeneous external field and trace statistics