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arXiv:2201.00553 · Journal of Physics Communications

Nonlocal pseudospin dynamics in a quantum Ising chain

K. L. Zhang, Z. Song

Published Sep 1, 2022• 0 citations
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Abstract

Abstract The existence of topological zero modes in nontrivial phase of quantum Ising chain results in not only the Kramers-like degeneracy spectrum, but also dynamic response for non-Hermitian perturbation in the ordered phase (2021 Phys. Rev. Lett. 126 116 401). In this work, we investigate the possible response of the degeneracy spectrum for Hermitian perturbations. We provide a single-particle description of the model in the ordered phase, associating with an internal degree of freedom characterized as a pseudospin. The effective magnetic field, arising from both local and nonlocal perturbations in terms of string operators, acts on the pseudospin. We show that the action of string operator can be realized via a quench under the local perturbations. As an application, any ground states and excited states for the Hamiltonian with perturbation can be selected to identify the quantum phase, by adding the other perturbations to trigger a quench and measuring the Loschmidt echo.

DOI
10.1088/2399-6528/ac9035

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Abstract The existence of topological zero modes in nontrivial phase of quantum Ising chain results in not only the Kramers-like degeneracy spectrum, but also dynamic response for non-Hermitian perturbation in the ordered phase (2021 Phys. Rev. Lett. 126 116 401). In this work, we investigate the possible response of the degeneracy spectrum for Hermitian perturbations. We provide a single-particle description of the model in the ordered phase, associating with an internal degree of freedom characterized as a pseudospin. The effective magnetic field, arising from both local and nonlocal perturbations in terms of string operators, acts on the pseudospin. We show that the action of string operator can be realized via a quench under the local perturbations. As an application, any ground states and excited states for the Hamiltonian with perturbation can be selected to identify the quantum phase, by adding the other perturbations to trigger a quench and measuring the Loschmidt echo.
We study the response of a thermal state of an Ising chain to a nonlocal non-Hermitian perturbation, which coalesces the topological Kramer-like degeneracy in the ferromagnetic phase. The dynamic responses for initial thermal states in different quantum phases are distinct. The final state always approaches its half component with a fixed parity in the ferromagnetic phase but remains almost unchanged in the paramagnetic phase. This indicates that the phase diagram at zero temperature is completely preserved at finite temperatures. Numerical simulations for Loschmidt echoes demonstrate such dynamical behaviors in finite-size systems. In addition, it provides a clear manifestation of the bulk-boundary correspondence at nonzero temperatures. This work presents an alternative approach to understanding the quantum phase transitions of quantum spin systems at nonzero temperatures.
The ground-state degeneracy of the quantum spin system is a characteristic of nontrivial topology when it is gapped and robust against disordered perturbation. The corresponding quantum phase transition (QPT) is usually driven by a real parameter. We study a non-Hermitian Ising chain with two transverse fields, one real and another imaginary, based on the exact solution and numerical simulation. We show that topological degeneracy still exists and can be obtained by an imaginary transverse field from a topologically trivial phase of a Hermitian system. The topological degeneracy is robust against the random imaginary field and therefore expected to be immune to disordered dissipation from the spontaneous decay in experiment. The underlying mechanism is the nonlocal symmetry, which emerges only in thermodynamic limit and relates two categories of QPTs in the quantum spin system, rooted from topological order and symmetry breaking, respectively.
We study the response to sudden local perturbations of highly excited quantum Ising spin chains. The key quantity encoding this response is the overlap between time-dependent wave functions, which we write as a transient Loschmidt Echo. Its asymptotics at long time differences contain crucial information about the structure of the highly excited nonequilibrium environment induced by the quench. We compute the echo perturbatively for a weak local quench but for arbitrarily large global quench, using a cumulant expansion. Our perturbative results suggest that the echo decays exponentially, rather than power law as in the low-energy orthogonality catastrophe, a further example of quench-induced decoherence already found in the case of quenched Luttinger liquids. The emerging decoherence scale is set by the strength of the local potential and the bulk excitation energy.
In this paper, with the help of Hermitian/non-Hermitian dynamic strings, a theory of non-Hermitian topological orders is developed based on a non-Hermitian Wen-plaquette model. The effective models for bosonic topological excitations (eee particles and mmm particles) are Hermitian tight-binding lattice models; the effective model for fermionic topological excitations (fff particles) becomes a non-Hermitian tight-binding lattice model. In addition, the effective pseudospin model for topologically degenerate ground states is derived by calculating the expectation values of Hermitian/non-Hermitian topologically closed dynamic strings. For the topologically degenerate ground states of the non-Hermitian Wen-plaquette model on even-by-odd, odd-by-even, and odd-by-odd lattices, anomalous topological degeneracy occurs, i.e., the number of topologically protected ground states may be reduced from 2 to 1. Now, the effective pseudospin model turns into the typical PT\mathcal{PT}PT-symmetric non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with spontaneous PT\mathcal{PT}PT symmetry breaking. At exceptional points, the topologically degenerate ground states merge with each other and the topological degeneracy turns into non-Hermitian degeneracy. In the end, the application of the non-Hermitian Z2{Z}_{2}Z2​ topological order and its possible physics realization are discussed.
We demonstrate that non-Hermitian perturbations can probe topological phase transitions and unambiguously detect non-Abelian zero modes. We show that under carefully designed non-Hermitian perturbations, the Loschmidt echo(LE) decays into 1/N where N is the ground state degeneracy in the topological non-trivial phase, while it approaches 1 in the trivial phase. This distinction is robust against small parameter deviations in the non-Hermitian perturbations. We further study four well-known models that support Majorana or parafermionic zero modes. By calculating their dynamical responses to specific non-Hermitian perturbations, we prove that the steady-state LE can indeed differentiate between different phases. This method avoids the ambiguity introduced by trivial zero-energy states and thus provides an alternative and promising way to demonstrate the emergence of topologically non-trivial phases. The experimental realizations of non-Hermitian perturbations are discussed.
We study the anisotropic XY chain in a transverse field by introducing a global string order parameter and examining its equilibrium behavior and its quench dynamics from a fully polarized initial state. The corresponding string operator is defined as the product of local projected spin operators over the entire chain. The nonequilibrium order parameter is the long-time average of the logarithm of the string-operator expectation value per site after the quench. For the ground state, its field derivative is singular on the Ising critical lines; after the quench, the steady-state response also records the field boundaries and the anisotropy transition. We derive analytically the nonanalytic behavior of the order parameter at the quantum critical lines. Our results reveal a hidden nonlocal order underlying this paradigmatic model of conventional quantum phase transitions. They also connect measurable spin populations with equilibrium and dynamical topological structure.