In mathematical physics, a lattice model is a mathematical model of a physical system that is defined on a lattice, as opposed to a continuum, such as the continuum of space or spacetime. Lattice models originally occurred in the context of condensed matter physics, where the atoms of a crystal automatically form a lattice. Currently, lattice models are quite popular in theoretical physics, for many reasons. Some models are exactly solvable, and thus offer insight into physics beyond what can be learned from perturbation theory. Lattice models are also ideal for study by the methods of computational physics, as the discretization of any continuum model automatically turns it into a lattice model. The exact solution to many of these models (when they are solvable) includes the presence of solitons. Techniques for solving these include the inverse scattering transform and the method of Lax pairs, the Yang–Baxter equation and quantum groups. The solution of these models has given insights into the nature of phase transitions, magnetization and scaling behaviour, as well as insights into the nature of quantum field theory. Physical lattice models frequently occur as an approximation to a continuum theory, either to give an ultraviolet cutoff to the theory to prevent divergences or to perform numerical computations. An example of a continuum theory that is widely studied by lattice models is the QCD lattice model, a discretization of quantum chromodynamics. However, digital physics considers nature fundamentally discrete at the Planck scale, which imposes upper limit to the density of information, aka Holographic principle. More generally, lattice gauge theory and lattice field theory are areas of study. Lattice models are also used to simulate the structure and dynamics of polymers. A number of lattice models can be described by the following data: A lattice , often taken to be a lattice in -dimensional Euclidean space or the -dimensional torus if the lattice is periodic. Concretely, is often the cubic lattice.

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Related concepts (6)
Lattice field theory
In physics, lattice field theory is the study of lattice models of quantum field theory, that is, of field theory on a space or spacetime that has been discretised onto a lattice. Although most lattice field theories are not exactly solvable, they are of tremendous appeal because they can be studied by simulation on a computer, often using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. One hopes that, by performing simulations on larger and larger lattices, while making the lattice spacing smaller and smaller, one will be able to recover the behavior of the continuum theory as the continuum limit is approached.
Lattice QCD
Lattice QCD is a well-established non-perturbative approach to solving the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory of quarks and gluons. It is a lattice gauge theory formulated on a grid or lattice of points in space and time. When the size of the lattice is taken infinitely large and its sites infinitesimally close to each other, the continuum QCD is recovered. Analytic or perturbative solutions in low-energy QCD are hard or impossible to obtain due to the highly nonlinear nature of the strong force and the large coupling constant at low energies.
Mean-field theory
In physics and probability theory, Mean-field theory (MFT) or Self-consistent field theory studies the behavior of high-dimensional random (stochastic) models by studying a simpler model that approximates the original by averaging over degrees of freedom (the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary). Such models consider many individual components that interact with each other. The main idea of MFT is to replace all interactions to any one body with an average or effective interaction, sometimes called a molecular field.
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