Upper and lower critical decay exponents of Ising ferromagnets with long-range interaction.

We investigate the universality class of the finite-temperature phase transition of the two-dimensional Ising model with the algebraically decaying ferromagnetic long-range interaction, J_{ij}=|r[over ⃗]{i}-r[over ⃗]{j}|^{-(d+σ)}, where d (=2) is the dimension of the system and σ is the decay exponent, by means of the order-N cluster-algorithm Monte Carlo method. In particular, we focus on the upper and lower critical decay exponents, the boundaries between the mean-field-universality, intermediate, and short-range-universality regimes. At the critical decay exponents, it is found that the standard Binder ratio of magnetization at the critical temperature exhibits extremely slow convergence as a function of the system size. We propose more effective physical quantities, namely the combined Binder ratio and the self-combined Binder ratio, both of which cancel the leading finite-size corrections of the conventional Binder ratio. Utilizing these techniques, we clearly demonstrate that in two dimensions, the lower and upper critical decay exponents are σ=1 and 7/4, respectively, contrary to the recent Monte Carlo and renormalization-group studies [M. Picco, arXiv:1207.1018; T. Blanchard et al., Europhys. Lett. 101, 56003 (2013)EULEEJ0295-507510.1209/0295-5075/101/56003].