On the absence of spontaneous symmetry breaking and of crystalline ordering in two-dimensional systems

We develop a unified approach, based on Araki's relative entropy concept, to proving absence of spontaneous breaking of continuous, internal symmetries and translation invariance in two-dimensional statistical-mechanical systems. More precisely, we show that, under rather general assumptions on the interactions, all equilibrium states of a two-dimensional system have all the symmetries, compact internal and spatial, of the dynamics, except possibly rotation invariance. (Rotation invariance remains unbroken if connected correlations decay more rapidly than the inverse square distance.) We also prove that two-dimensional systems with a non-compact internal symmetry group, like anharmonic crystals, typically do not have Gibbs states.