Anyonic quantum spin chains: Spin-1 generalizations and topological stability

Since the Heisenberg spin chain can be considered the simplest realistic model of magnetism, surprise and some degree of controversy have resulted from recent work of Haldane. The prediction is that quantum spin chains with half-integer spin should all display T=0 phase behavior equivalent to that of the Bethe Ansatz integrable (solvable) spin-1/2 quantum chain. More remarkably, the class of integer spin chains is predicted to show very different phase behavior. In particular, a gap should be present in the spectrum of a Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain. This remarkable feature is counterintuitive in terms of accepted wisdom in magnetism (spin-wave theory, spin-Peierls theory) and critical phenomena. Consequently the vertification of the prediction is of great interest. A considerable amount of numerical work has been done, involving finite-chain, finite-size scaling, variational, Monte Carlo and other calculations, which will be reviewed here. The present consensus is that the weight of numerical evidence supports the prediction, although puzzling features still remain. Adding additional interactions to the basic Heisenberg Hamiltonian such as spin (XXZ) anisotropy, single-ion anisotropy, biquadratic exchange, and an applied magnetic field, generates a rich and complicated phase diagram for chains with spin >1/2, particularly for the case of integer spin. The s=1 phase diagram seems to display critical behavior of a type not previously encountered. A theoretical appraisal of the Haldane phenomenon will include a discussion of the possible role of nonintegrability. Mention will also be made of current progress in experimental investigation of the phenomenon, including problems that might be encountered. More recent work of Affleck has greatly generalized the field-theoretic mappings which underlay the original work of Haldane. A number of interesting problems have been mapped into quantum spin chains of various types, including field theoretic phenomena and the localization problem of the quantum Hall effect.

The dynamical behavior of the quantum state of different quantum spin chains, with designed site-dependent interaction strengths, is analyzed when the initial state belongs to the one excitation subspace. Our results show that the inhomogeneous chains transfer single excitations with near-perfect fidelity for two different spin chain Hamiltonians. The first one is the ferromagnetic Heisenberg Hamiltonian with nearest neighbor interactions. The second spin chain has long-range anisotropic interactions, ferromagnetic in one direction and antiferromagnetic in the orthogonal plane. Both designed chains have in common a partially ordered spectrum and well-localized eigenvectors. This physical trait unifies the description of both kinds of systems.

We discuss a relationship between certain one-dimensional quantum spin chains and anyon chains. In particular, we show how the XXZ Heisenberg chain is realized as a D3 (alternatively su(2)4) anyon model. We find that the difference between the models lies primarily in the choice of boundary conditions.

In the present work, we study the fidelity susceptibility and the entanglement entropy in an antiferromagnetic spin-1 chain with additional next-nearest neighbor interactions and three-site interactions, which are given by H=(J1SiSi+1+ J2SiSi+2)+[J3(SiSi+1)(Si+1Si+2)+ h.c.]. By using the density matrix renormalization group method, the ground-state properties of the system are calculated with very high accuracy. We investigate the effect of the three-site interaction J3 on the fidelity susceptibility numerically, and then analyze its relation with the quantum phase transition (QPT). The fidelity measures the similarity between two states, and the fidelity susceptibility describes the associated changing rate. The QPT is intuitively accompanied by an abrupt change in the structure of the ground-state wave function, so generally a peak of the fidelity susceptibility indicates a QPT and the location of the peak denotes the critical point. For the case of J2=0, a peak of the fidelity susceptibility is found by varying J3, and the height of the peak grows as the system size increases. The location of the peak shifts to a slightly lower J3 up to a particular value as the system size increases. Through a finite size scaling, the critical point J3c=0.111 of the QPT from the Haldane spin liquid to the dimerized phase is identified. We also study the effect of the three-site interaction on the entanglement entropy between the right half part and the rest. It is noted that the peak of the entanglement entropy does not coincide with the critical point. Instead, the critical point is determined by the position at which the first-order derivative of the entanglement entropy takes its minimum, since a second-order QPT is signaled by the first derivative of density matrix element. Moreover, the entanglement entropy disappears when J3=1/6, which corresponds to the size-independent Majumdar-Ghosh point. The positions of quantum critical points extracted from these two quantum information observables agree well with those obtained by the string order parameters, which characterizes the topological order in the Haldane phase. Secondly, we also study the case of J20, and obtain the critical points by both the fidelity susceptibility and the entanglement entropy. Finally we provide a ground-state phase diagram of the system. To sum up, the quantum information observables are effective tools for detecting diverse QPTs in spin-1 models.

We derive general constraints on order and disorder parameters in Ising symmetric spin chains. Our main result is a theorem showing that every gapped, translationally invariant, Ising symmetric spin chain has either a nonzero order parameter or a nonzero disorder parameter. We also prove two more constraints on order and disorder parameters: (i) it is not possible for a gapped, Ising symmetric spin chain to have both a nonzero order parameter and a nonzero disorder parameter; and (ii) it is not possible for a spin chain of this kind to have a nonzero disorder parameter that is odd under the symmetry. These constraints have an interesting implication for self-dual Ising symmetric spin chains: every self-dual spin chain is either gapless or has a degenerate ground state in the thermodynamic limit. All of these constraints generalize to spin chains without translational symmetry. Our proofs rely on previously known bounds on entanglement and correlations in one dimensional systems, as well as the Fuchs-van de Graaf inequality from quantum information theory.

We study S=1/2 quantum spin chains with shift-invariant and inversion-symmetric next-nearest-neighbor interaction, also known as zigzag spin chains. We completely classify the integrability and non-integrability of the above class of spin systems. We prove that in this class there are only two integrable models, a classical model and a model solvable by the Bethe ansatz, and all the remaining systems are non-integrable. Our classification theorem confirms that within this class of spin chains, there is no missing integrable model. This theorem also implies the absence of intermediate models with a finite number of local conserved quantities.

The dynamical behaviour of the quantum state of different quantum spin chains, with designed site dependent interaction strengths, is analyzed when the initial state belongs to the one excitation subspace. It is shown that the inhomogeneous chains are able to transfer excitations with near perfect fidelity. This behaviour is found for two very different spin chain Hamiltonians. The first one is the ferromagnetic Heisenberg Hamiltonian with nearest neighbor interactions, the second one describes a chain with long range anisotropic interactions which are ferromagnetic in the $z$ direction and antiferromagnetic in the $(x,y)$ plane. It is shown that both designed chains have in common a partially ordered spectrum and well localized eigenvectors. This physical trait unifies the description of both kind of systems.

Quantum ladder models, consisting of coupled chains, form intriguing systems\nbridging one and two dimensions and have been well studied in the context of\nquantum magnets and fermionic systems. Here we consider ladder systems made of\nmore exotic quantum mechanical degrees of freedom, so-called non-Abelian\nanyons, which can be thought of as certain quantum deformations of ordinary\nSU(2) spins. Such non-Abelian anyons occur as quasiparticle excitations in\ntopological quantum fluids, including p_x + i p_y superconductors, certain\nfractional quantum Hall states, and rotating Bose-Einstein condensates. Here we\nuse a combination of exact diagonalization and conformal field theory to\ndetermine the phase diagrams of ladders with up to four chains. We discuss how\nphenomena familiar from ordinary SU(2) spin ladders are generalized in their\nanyonic counterparts, such as gapless and gapped phases, odd/even effects with\nthe ladder width, and elementary `magnon' excitations. Other features are\nentirely due to the topological nature of the anyonic degrees of freedom.\n

Lattice ℤ3 theories with complex actions share many key features with finite- density QCD including a sign problem and CK symmetry. Complex ℤ3 spin and gauge models exhibit a generalized Kramers-Wannier duality mapping them onto chiral ℤ3 spin and gauge models, which are simulatable with standard lattice methods in large regions of parameter space. The Migdal-Kadanoff real-space renormalization group (RG) preserves this duality, and we use it to compute the approximate phase diagram of both spin and gauge ℤ3 models in dimensions one through four. Chiral ℤ3 spin models are known to exhibit a Devil’s Flower phase structure, with inhomogeneous phases that can be thought of as ℤ3 analogues of chiral spirals. Out of the large class of models we study, we find that only chiral spin models and their duals have a Devil’s Flower structure with an infinite set of inhomogeneous phases, a result we attribute to Elitzur’s theorem. We also find that different forms of the Migdal-Kadanoff RG produce different numbers of phases, a violation of the expectation for universal behavior from a real-space RG. We discuss extensions of our work to ℤN models, SU(N) models and nonzero temperature.

We study the S matrix of a spin- s quantum spin chain which can be interpreted as a multicomponent quantum lattice gas. We show that this system contains integrable subsystems where the Bethe ansatz method is applicable. We demonstrate that for some ranges of parameters of a spin-1 model, the ground states and low-lying excited states are exactly given by those of integrable subsystems; exact calculation is possible even if the system is not strictly integrable as a whole. We also analyze the magnetization curves for the spin chain, with exact saturation fields.

Quantum spin chains with composite spins have been used to approximate conventional chains with higher spins. For instance, a spin 1 (or ) chain was sometimes approximated by a chain with two (or three) spin ’s per site. However, little examination has been given as to whether this approximation, effectively assuming the first Hund rule per site, is valid and why. In this paper, the validity of this approximation is investigated numerically. We diagonalize the Hamiltonians of spin chains with a spin 1 and per site and with two and three spin ’s per site. The low energy excitation spectrum for the spin chain with M spin ’s per site is found to coincide with that of the corresponding conventional chain with one spin per site. In particular, we find that as the system size increases, an increasingly larger block of consecutive lowest energy states with maximal spin per site is observed, robustly supporting the first Hund rule even though the exclusion principle does not apply and the system does not possess Coulomb repulsion. As for why this approximation works, we show that this effective Hund rule emerges as a plausible consequence when applying to composite spin systems the Lieb–Mattis theorem, which is originally for the ground state of ferrimagnetic and antiferromagnetic spin systems.

We study (anti-) instantons in super Yang-Mills theories defined on a non anticommutative superspace. The instanton solution that we consider is the same as in ordinary SU(2) N=1 super Yang-Mills, but the anti-instanton receives corrections to the U(1) part of the connection which depend quadratically on fermionic coordinates, and linearly on the deformation parameter C. By substituting the exact solution into the classical Lagrangian the topological charge density receives a new contribution which is quadratic in C and quartic in the fermionic zero-modes. The topological charge turns out to be zero. We perform an expansion around the exact classical solution in presence of a fermionic background and calculate the full superdeterminant contributing to the one-loop partition function. We find that the one-loop partition function is not modified with respect to the usual N=1 super Yang-Mills.

Many phenomena in magnetism can be described using classical models, yet magnetism is a quantum mechanical effect. In addition to thermal fluctuations, quantum fluctuations arise due to the quantum uncertainty of the ground state. These fluctuations are enhanced by low dimensionality and low spin. Spin chains show interesting excitations associated with quasiparticles. Model materials for spin chains can be realized in compounds where the interchain interactions are weak enough. This thesis presents neutron scattering studies of two model materials for spin chains with different spin symmetry. The spin2 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain CuSO4*5D2O has a main exchange of J ∼ 3 K, which permits to study its excitation spectrum up to temperatures of ten times the exchange. The spin2 Heisenberg magnet has been studied widely both theoretically and experimentally. The excitation spectrum of the spin2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet consists of quasiparticles called spinons, and calculations for it exist for T = 0 and as a function of temperature. A quantitative comparison between experimental data and theoretical models across a range of temperatures is presented. The excitation spectrum of CuSO4*5D2O is excellently described by the excitation spectrum of a spin2 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain at finite temperatures. Energy-temperature scaling is observed at temperatures up to 2J . For these temperatures the Luttinger liquid description of the spin2 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain is valid. A spinon continuum is confirmed at all measured temperatures. Therefore, even at ten times the main exchange (T ≈ 10 J), CuSO4*5D2O shows the behavior of a quantum magnet, and not of a classical system at infinite temperatures, for which one would expect single spin flips. The Ising chain is one of the most studied models in magnetism, one model compound for it is RbCoCl3. Optical spectroscopy measurements suggest a lower gap than for similar compounds, which makes it better suited for high resolution neutron spectroscopy. Magnetic correlations along the chains arise in RbCoCl3 below 80 K. A gapped continuum is observed, which arises from isolated antiferromagnetic Ising chains. Below the first magnetic ordering temperature TN1 ≈ 28 K bound states are observed, which arise due to correlations which form between the chains. Strong diffuse scattering leads to the conclusion that disorder is still present. At the second magnetic ordering transition, at TN2 ≈ 14 K, the bound states split as the correlations between the chains change. Fits indicate that the correlations change continuously as a function of temperature. Above TN2 the excitation spectrum of RbCoCl3 can be described by a spin1 2 Ising chain with an XY-component which is treated as a perturbation. Below TN2 the main features are reproduced correctly, but deviations from the details indicate that additional terms in the Hamiltonian may be necessary. This thesis was carried out at the Institut Laue-Langevin, the Laboratory for Neutron Scattering and Imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich.

Confinement describes the phenomenon when the attraction between two particles grows with their distance, most prominently found in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) between quarks. In condensed matter physics, confinement can appear in quantum spin chains, for example, in the one dimensional transverse field Ising model (TFIM) with an additional longitudinal field, famously observed in the quantum material cobalt niobate or in optical lattices. Here, we establish that state-of-the-art quantum computers have reached capabilities to simulate confinement physics in spin chains. We report quantitative confinement signatures of the TFIM on an IBM quantum computer observed via two distinct velocities for information propagation from domain walls and their mesonic bound states. We also find the confinement induced slow down of entanglement spreading by implementing randomized measurement protocols for the second order Rényi entanglement entropy. Our results are a crucial step for probing non-perturbative interacting quantum phenomena on digital quantum computers beyond the capabilities of classical hardware.

The complete one-loop planar dilatation operator of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills is isomorphic to the hamiltonian of an integrable PSU(2,2|4) quantum spin chain. We construct the non-linear sigma models describing the continuum limit of the SU(1|3) and SU(2|3) sectors of the complete N=4 chain. We explicitely identify the spin chain sigma model with the one for a superstring moving in AdS_5xS^5 with large angular momentum along the five-sphere.