Correlation at low temperature: I. Exponential decay

The present paper generalizes the analysis in (Ann. H. Poincaré 1 (2000) 59, Math. J. (AMS) 8 (1997) 123) of the correlations for a lattice system of real-valued spins at low temperature. The Gibbs measure is assumed to be generated by a fairly general Hamiltonian function with pair interaction. The novelty, as compared to [2,20], is that the single-site (self-) energies of the spins are not required to have only a single local minimum and no other extrema. Our derivation of exponential decay of correlations goes through the spectral analysis of a deformed Laplacian closely related to the Witten Laplacian studied in [2,20]. We prove that this Laplacian has a spectral gap above zero and argue that this implies exponential decay of the correlations.