Potts

Potts is a surname and a place name used in English-speaking regions. The name appears in historical records across the United Kingdom, Ireland, and North America, and is borne by a number of individuals in various professions.

The Potts model is a mathematical model in statistical mechanics named after Renfrey Potts, who introduced it in 1952. It generalizes the Ising model by allowing each site on a lattice to assume one of q possible states. The energy favors neighboring sites being in the same state, and the model is used to study phase transitions, critical phenomena, and ordering in systems with multistate variables. In two dimensions, exact results exist for certain q values; higher-dimensional cases are explored through numerical methods and approximations.

Beyond people and physics, Potts appears in geography as a place name and in various organizations, institutions, and fictional works, reflecting its status as a common English-language surname and toponym.