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arXiv:1107.1266 · Journal of Mathematical Physics

Counterexamples to ferromagnetic ordering of energy levels

Wolfgang Spitzer, Shannon Starr, Lam Tran

Published Apr 1, 2012• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The Heisenberg ferromagnet has symmetry group SU(2). The property known as ferromagnetic ordering of energy levels (FOEL) states that the minimum energy eigenvalue among eigenvectors with total spin s is monotone decreasing as a function of s. While this property holds for certain graphs such as open chains, in this note we demonstrate some counterexamples. We consider the spin 1/2 model on rings of length 2n for n = 2, 3, …, 8, and show that the minimum energy among all spin singlets is less than or equal to the minimum energy among all spin triplets, which violates FOEL. This also shows some counterexamples to the “Aldous ordering” for the symmetric exclusion process. We also review some of the literature related to these examples.

DOI
10.1063/1.3699015

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The Heisenberg ferromagnet has symmetry group SU(2). The property known as ferromagnetic ordering of energy levels (FOEL) states that the minimum energy eigenvalue among eigenvectors with total spin s is monotone decreasing as a function of s. While this property holds for certain graphs such as open chains, in this note we demonstrate some counterexamples. We consider the spin 1/2 model on rings of length 2n for n = 2, 3, …, 8, and show that the minimum energy among all spin singlets is less than or equal to the minimum energy among all spin triplets, which violates FOEL. This also shows some counterexamples to the “Aldous ordering” for the symmetric exclusion process. We also review some of the literature related to these examples.
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We prove ferromagnetic ordering of energy levels for XXX Heisenberg chains with spins of arbitrary magnitude, thus extending our previous result for the spin-1/2 chain. Ferromagnetic ordering means that the minimum energies in the invariant subspaces of fixed total spin are monotone decreasing as a function of the total spin. This result provides a ferromagnetic analogue of the well-known theorem by Lieb and Mattis about ordering of energy levels in antiferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic systems on bipartite graphs.
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Ferromagnetic Ordering of Energy Levels for Uq(mathfraksl2)U_q(\\mathfrak{sl}_2)Uq​(mathfraksl2​) Symmetric Spin\n Chains
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We present a general method to determine the energy minimum of spin Hamiltonians over separable states when the single-particle reduced density matrices are fixed. For ferromagnetic Ising and Ising-like models with nearest-neighbor interactions on lattices of any dimension and on a fully connected graph in an external field, this minimum is given by a compact analytic formula involving the quantum Fisher information. For the ferromagnetic Heisenberg chain of spin-1/2 particles, the minimum is expressed via the Uhlmann-Jozsa fidelity. These relations enable the direct extraction of both the quantum Fisher information and the fidelity from correlation measurements on the ground states of suitably engineered spin models.