Zeros of ferromagnetic 2-spin systems

We study zeros of the partition functions of ferromagnetic 2-state spin systems in terms of the external field, and obtain new zero-free regions of these systems via a refinement of Asano's and Ruelle's contraction method. The strength of our results is that they do not depend on the maximum degree of the underlying graph. Via Barvinok's method, we also obtain new efficient and deterministic approximate counting algorithms. When the edge interaction is attractive for both spins, our algorithm outperforms all other methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo and correlation decay.