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arXiv:1902.08335 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Polarization amplitude near quantum critical points

Shunsuke C. Furuya, Masaaki Nakamura

Published Apr 29, 2019• 10 citations
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Abstract

We discuss the polarization amplitude of quantum spin systems in one dimension. In particular, we closely investigate it in gapless phases of those systems based on the two-dimensional conformal field theory. The polarization amplitude is defined as the ground-state average of a twist operator which induces a large gauge transformation attaching the unit amount of the $U(1)$ flux to the system. We show that the polarization amplitude under the periodic boundary condition is sensitive to perturbations around the fixed point of the renormalization-group flow rather than the fixed point itself even when the perturbation is irrelevant. This dependence is encoded into the scaling law with respect to the system size. In this paper, we show how and why the scaling law of the polarization amplitude encodes the information of the renormalization-group flow. In addition, we show that the polarization amplitude under the antiperiodic boundary condition is determined fully by the fixed point in contrast to that under the periodic one and that it visualizes clearly the nontriviality of spin systems in the sense of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.99.144426

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We discuss the polarization amplitude of quantum spin systems in one dimension. In particular, we closely investigate it in gapless phases of those systems based on the two-dimensional conformal field theory. The polarization amplitude is defined as the ground-state average of a twist operator which induces a large gauge transformation attaching the unit amount of the U(1)U(1)U(1) flux to the system. We show that the polarization amplitude under the periodic boundary condition is sensitive to perturbations around the fixed point of the renormalization-group flow rather than the fixed point itself even when the perturbation is irrelevant. This dependence is encoded into the scaling law with respect to the system size. In this paper, we show how and why the scaling law of the polarization amplitude encodes the information of the renormalization-group flow. In addition, we show that the polarization amplitude under the antiperiodic boundary condition is determined fully by the fixed point in contrast to that under the periodic one and that it visualizes clearly the nontriviality of spin systems in the sense of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem.
We establish that spin liquids described in terms of gapless fermionic (Dirac) spinons and gapless U(1)U(1)U(1) gauge fluctuations can be stable in two dimensions, at least when the physical SU(2)SU(2)SU(2) spin symmetry is generalized to SU(N)SU(N)SU(N). Equivalently, we show that compact QED3{\mathrm{QED}}_{3}QED3​ has a deconfined phase for a large number of fermion fields, in the sense that monopole fluctuations can be irrelevant at low energies. A precise characterization is provided by an emergent global topological U(1)U(1)U(1) symmetry corresponding to the conservation of gauge flux. Beginning with an SU(N)SU(N)SU(N) generalization of the S=1∕2S=1∕2S=1∕2 square-lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet, we consider the $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux spin liquid and, via a systematic analysis of all operators, show that there are no relevant perturbations (in the renormalization-group sense) about the large-NNN spin-liquid fixed point, which is thus a stable phase. We provide a further illustration of this conclusion with an approximate renormalization-group calculation that treats the gapless fermions and the monopoles on an equal footing. This approach directly points out some of the flaws in the erroneous ``screening'' argument for the relevance of monopoles in compact QED3{\mathrm{QED}}_{3}QED3​.
We investigate the second-order Rényi entanglement entropy at the quantum critical point of a spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a columnar dimerized square lattice. The universal constant γγγ in the area-law scaling S2(ℓ)=αℓ−γS_{2}(\ell) = α\ell - γS2​(ℓ)=αℓ−γ is found to be sensitive to the entangling surface configurations, with γsp>0γ_{\text{sp}} > 0γsp​>0 for strong-bond-cut (special) surfaces and γord<0γ_{\text{ord}} < 0γord​<0 for weak-bond-cut (ordinary) surfaces, which is attributed to the distinct conformal boundary conditions. Introducing boundary dimerization drives a renormalization group (RG) flow from the special to the ordinary boundary criticality, and the constant γγγ decreases monotonically with increasing dimerization strength, demonstrating irreversible evolution under the boundary RG flow. These results provide numerical evidence for a higher-dimensional analog of the ggg theorem, and suggest γγγ as a possible characteristic function for boundary RG flow in (2+1)(2+1)(2+1)-dimensional conformal field theory.
We analyze the effect of decoherence, modeled by local quantum channels, on quantum critical states and we find universal properties of the resulting mixed state's entanglement, both between system and environment and within the system. Renyi entropies exhibit volume law scaling with a subleading constant governed by a "g function" in conformal field theory, allowing us to define a notion of renormalization group (RG) flow (or "phase transitions") between quantum channels. We also find that the entropy of a subsystem in the decohered state has a subleading logarithmic scaling with subsystem size, and we relate it to correlation functions of boundary condition changing operators in the conformal field theory. Finally, we find that the subsystem entanglement negativity, a measure of quantum correlations within mixed states, can exhibit log scaling or area law based on the RG flow. When the channel corresponds to a marginal perturbation, the coefficient of the log scaling can change continuously with decoherence strength. We illustrate all these possibilities for the critical ground state of the transverse-field Ising model, in which we identify four RG fixed points of dephasing channels and verify the RG flow numerically. Our results are relevant to quantum critical states realized on noisy quantum simulators, in which our predicted entanglement scaling can be probed via shadow tomography methods.
We present the finite-size scaling theory of one-dimensional quantum critical systems in the presence of boundaries. While the finite-size spectrum in the conformal limit, namely of a conformal field theory with conformally invariant boundary conditions, is related to the dimensions of boundary operators by Cardy, the actual spectra of lattice models are affected by both bulk and boundary perturbations and contain non-universal boundary energies. We obtain a general expression of the finite-size energy levels in the presence of bulk and boundary perturbations. In particular, a generic boundary perturbation related to the energy-momentum tensor gives rise to a renormalization of the effective system size. We verify our field-theory formulation by comparing the results with the exact solution of the critical transverse-field Ising chain and with accurate numerical results on the critical three-state Potts chain obtained by Density-Matrix Renormalization Group.
In a Monte Carlo study using a cluster update algorithm we investigate finite-size scaling (FSS) of the correlation lengths of several representatives of the class of three-dimensional classical O(n)\mathrm{O}(n)O(n) symmetric spin models on the geometry ${T}^{2}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}R$. For all the models we find strong evidence of a linear relation between FSS amplitudes and scaling dimensions when applying antiperiodic instead of periodic boundary conditions across the torus. This type of scaling relation can be proven analytically for systems on two-dimensional strips with periodic boundary conditions using conformal field theory.
Recently it has been shown that the fidelity of the ground state of a quantum many-body system can be used to detect its quantum critical points (QCPs). If g denotes the parameter in the Hamiltonian with respect to which the fidelity is computed, we find that for one-dimensional models with large but finite size, the fidelity susceptibility χF can detect a QCP provided that the correlation length exponent satisfies ν< 2. We then show that χF can be used to locate a QCP even if ν 2 if we introduce boundary conditions labeled by a twist angle Nθ ,w hereN is the system size. If the QCP lies at g = 0, we find that if N is kept constant, χF has a scaling form given by χF ∼ θ −2/ν f(g/θ 1/ν )i fθ � 2π/N. We illustrate this both in a tight-binding model of fermions with a spatially varying chemical potential with amplitude h and period 2q in which ν = q, and in a XY spin-1/2 chain in which ν = 2. Finally we show that when q is very large, the model has two additional QCPs at h =± 2 which cannot be detected by studying the energy spectrum but are clearly detected by χF. The peak value and width of χF seem to scale as nontrivial powers of q at these QCPs. We argue that these QCPs mark a transition between extended and localized states at the Fermi energy.