Study of the cumulant expansion for renormalization transformations on two- and three- dimensional Ising models

The Niemeijer-Van Leeuwen cumulant expansion is used in the renormalization-group analysis of the critical-point behavior of the Ising model. Second- and third-order results are obtained for the simple cubic and square lattices, respectively, for a variety of cell sizes, using a parameter-dependent renormalization transformation introduced by Kadanoff and Houghton. Although the results in two dimensions are in general good, there is no evidence of any convergence, with the best values for the critical exponents and critical temperature being given by the second-order theory. In three dimensions the values found for the critical temperature and magnetic scaling index for a cell of 27 spins are reasonable, but the corresponding thermal scaling index is quite poor.