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arXiv:2106.07664 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Fractonic plaquette-dimer liquid beyond renormalization

Yizhi You, Roderich Moessner

Published Sep 27, 2022• 23 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We consider close-packed tiling models of geometric objects---a mixture of hardcore dimers and plaquettes---as a generalization of the familiar dimer models. Specifically, on an anisotropic cubic lattice, we demand that each site be covered by either a dimer on a $z$ link or a plaquette in the $x\text{\ensuremath{-}}y$ plane. The space of such fully packed tilings has an extensive degeneracy. This maps onto a fracton-type ``higher-rank electrostatics,'' which can exhibit a plaquette-dimer liquid and an ordered phase. We analyze this theory in detail, using height representations and T-duality to demonstrate that the concomitant phase transition occurs due to the proliferation of dipoles formed by defect pairs. The resultant critical theory can be considered as a fracton version of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. A significant new element is its UV-IR mixing, where the low-energy behavior of the liquid phase and the transition out of it is dominated by local (short-wavelength) fluctuations, rendering the critical phenomenon beyond the renormalization group paradigm.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.106.115145

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We consider close-packed tiling models of geometric objects---a mixture of hardcore dimers and plaquettes---as a generalization of the familiar dimer models. Specifically, on an anisotropic cubic lattice, we demand that each site be covered by either a dimer on a zzz link or a plaquette in the x\ensuremath-yx\text{\ensuremath{-}}yx\ensuremath-y plane. The space of such fully packed tilings has an extensive degeneracy. This maps onto a fracton-type ``higher-rank electrostatics,'' which can exhibit a plaquette-dimer liquid and an ordered phase. We analyze this theory in detail, using height representations and T-duality to demonstrate that the concomitant phase transition occurs due to the proliferation of dipoles formed by defect pairs. The resultant critical theory can be considered as a fracton version of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. A significant new element is its UV-IR mixing, where the low-energy behavior of the liquid phase and the transition out of it is dominated by local (short-wavelength) fluctuations, rendering the critical phenomenon beyond the renormalization group paradigm.
Proliferation of defects is a mechanism that allows for topological phase transitions. Such a phase transition is found in two dimensions for the XY model, which lies in the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) universality class. The transition point can be found using renormalization group analysis. We apply renormalization group arguments to determine the nature of BKT transitions for the three-dimensional plaquette-dimer model, which is a model that exhibits fractonic mobility constraints. We show that an important part of this analysis demands a modified dimensional analysis that changes the interpretation of scaling dimensions upon coarse-graining. Using this modified dimensional analysis, we compute the beta functions of the model and predict a finite critical value above which the fractonic phase melts, proliferating dipoles. Importantly, the transition point is found through a renormalization group analysis that accounts for the phenomenon of UV/IR mixing, characteristic of fractonic models.
We propose an unconventional topological quantum phase transition connecting a higher-order topological insulator (HOTI) and a featureless Mott insulator sharing the same symmetry patterns. We construct an effective theory description of the quantum critical point (QCP) by combining a bosonization approach and the coupled-stripe construction of 1D critical spin ladders. The phase transition theory is characterized by a critical dipole liquid theory with subsystem U(1)U(1)U(1) symmetry whose low energy modes contain a Bose surface along the kx,kyk_x,k_ykx​,ky​ axis. Such a quantum critical point manifests fracton dynamics and the breakdown of the area law entanglement entropy due to the existence of a Bose surface. We numerically confirm our findings by measuring the entanglement entropy, topological rank-2 Berry phase, and the static structure factor throughout the topological transition and compare it with our previous approach obtained from the percolation picture. A significant new element of our phase transition theory is that the infrared~(IR) effective theory is controlled by short wave-length fluctuations with peculiar UV-IR mixing.
Using the tensor network approach, we investigate the monomer-dimer models on a checkerboard lattice, in which there are interactions (with strength vvv) between the parallel dimers on half of the plaquettes. For the fully packed interacting dimer model, we observe a Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transition between the low-temperature symmetry breaking and the high-temperature critical phases; for the doped monomer-dimer case with finite chemical potential $\ensuremath{\mu}$, we also find an order-disorder phase transition which is of second order instead. We use the boundary matrix product state approach to detect the KT and second-order phase transitions and obtain the phase diagrams $v\text{\ensuremath{-}}T$ and $\ensuremath{\mu}\text{\ensuremath{-}}T$. Moreover, for the noninteracting monomer-dimer model (setting $\ensuremath{\mu}=\ensuremath{\nu}=0$), we get an extraordinarily accurate determination of the free energy per site (negative of the monomer-dimer constant h2{h}_{2}h2​) as $f=\ensuremath{-}0.662\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}798\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}972\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}833\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}746$ with the dimer density n=0.638123109228547n=0.638\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}123\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}109\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}228\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}547n=0.638123109228547, both of 15 correct digits.
The theory of quantum phase transitions separating different phases with distinct symmetry patterns at zero temperature is one of the foundations of modern quantum many-body physics. Here we demonstrate that the existence of a two-dimensional topological phase transition between a higher-order topological insulator (HOTI) and a trivial Mott insulator with the same symmetry eludes this paradigm. We present a theory of this quantum critical point (QCP) driven by the fluctuations and percolation of the domain walls between a HOTI and a trivial Mott insulator region. Due to the spinon zero modes that decorate the rough corners of the domain walls, the fluctuations of the phase boundaries trigger a spinon-dipole hopping term with fracton dynamics. Hence we find that the QCP is characterized by a critical dipole liquid theory with subsystem U(1) symmetry and the breakdown of the area law entanglement entropy which exhibits a logarithmic enhancement: Lln(L)Lln(L)Lln(L). Using the density matrix renormalization group method, we analyze the dipole stiffness together with the structure factor at the QCP, which provides strong evidence of a critical dipole liquid with a Bose surface, UV-IR mixing, and a dispersion relation $\ensuremath{\omega}={k}_{x}{k}_{y}.$
We propose an unconventional topological quantum phase transition connecting a higher-order topological insulator (HOTI) and a featureless Mott insulator sharing the same symmetry patterns. We delineate the effective theory description of the quantum critical point (QCP) by combining the bosonization approach and the coupled-stripe construction of 1D critical spin ladders. The phase transition theory is characterized by a critical dipole liquid theory with subsystem U(1)U(1)U(1) symmetry whose low energy modes contain a Bose surface along the kx,kyk_x,k_ykx​,ky​ axis. Such a quantum critical point manifests fracton dynamics and the breakdown of the area law entanglement entropy due to the existence of a Bose surface. We numerically confirm this finding by measuring the entanglement entropy, topological Berry phase, and the static structure factor throughout the topological transition and compare it with our previous approach obtained from the percolation picture. A significant new element of our phase transition theory is that the infrared (IR) effective theory is controlled by short wave-length fluctuation with peculiar UV-IR mixing.
We present a detailed study of a model of close-packed dimers on the square lattice with an interaction between nearest-neighbor dimers. The interaction favors parallel alignment of dimers, resulting in a low-temperature crystalline phase. With large-scale Monte Carlo and transfer matrix calculations, we show that the crystal melts through a Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition to give rise to a high-temperature critical phase, with algebraic decays of correlations functions with exponents that vary continuously with the temperature. We give a theoretical interpretation of these results by mapping the model to a Coulomb gas, whose coupling constant and associated exponents are calculated numerically with high precision. Introducing monomers is a marginal perturbation at the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and gives rise to another critical line. We study this line numerically, showing that it is in the Ashkin-Teller universality class, and terminates in a tricritical point at finite temperature and monomer fugacity. In the course of this work, we also derive analytic results relevant to the noninteracting case of dimer coverings, including a Bethe ansatz (at the free fermion point) analysis, a detailed discussion of the effective height model, and a free field analysis of height fluctuations.