We consider Majorana lattices with two-site interactions consisting of a general function of the fermion bilinear. The models are exactly solvable in the limit of a large number of on-site fermions. The four-site chain exhibits a quantum phase transition controlled by the hopping parameters and manifests itself in a discontinuous entanglement entropy, obtained by constraining the one-sided modular Hamiltonian. Inspired by recent work within the AdS/CFT correspondence, we identify transitions between types of von Neumann operator algebras throughout the phase diagram. We find transitions of the form II_{1}↔III↔I_{∞} that reduce to II_{1}↔I_{∞} in the strongly interacting limit, where they connect nonfactorized and factorized ground states. Our results provide novel realizations of such transitions in a controlled many-body model.
We consider Majorana lattices with two-site interactions consisting of a general function of the fermion bilinear. The models are exactly solvable in the limit of a large number of on-site fermions. The four-site chain exhibits a quantum phase transition controlled by the hopping parameters and manifests itself in a discontinuous entanglement entropy, obtained by constraining the one-sided modular Hamiltonian. Inspired by recent work within the AdS/CFT correspondence, we identify transitions between types of von Neumann operator algebras throughout the phase diagram. We find transitions of the form II_{1}↔III↔I_{∞} that reduce to II_{1}↔I_{∞} in the strongly interacting limit, where they connect nonfactorized and factorized ground states. Our results provide novel realizations of such transitions in a controlled many-body model.
We study the exactly solvable one-dimensional model: the dimerized XY chain with uniform and staggered transverse fields, equivalent upon fermionization to the noninteracting dimerized Kitaev-Majorana chain with modulation. The model has three known gapped phases with local and nonlocal (string) orders, along with the gapless incommensurate (IC) phase in the U(1) limit. The criticality is controlled by the properties of zeros of model's partition function, analytically continued onto the complex wave numbers. In the ground state they become complex zeros of the spectrum of the Hamiltonian. The analysis of those roots yields the phase diagram which contains continuous quantum phase transitions and weaker singularities known as disorder lines (DLs) or modulation transitions. The latter are shown to occur in two types: DLs of the first kind with continuous appearance of the IC oscillations, and DLs of the second kind corresponding to a jump of the wave number of oscillations. The salient property of zeros of the spectrum is that the ground state is shown to be separable (factorized), and the model is disentangled on a subset of the DLs. From analysis of those zeros we also find the Majorana edge states and their wave functions.
A superconducting wire described by a p-wave pairing and a Kitaev Hamiltonian exhibits Majorana fermions at its edges and is topologically protected by symmetry. We consider two Kitaev wires (chains) coupled by a Coulomb-type interaction and study the complete phase diagram using analytical and numerical techniques. A topological superconducting phase with four Majorana fermions occurs until moderate interactions between chains. For large interactions, both repulsive and attractive, by analogy with the Hubbard model, we identify Mott phases with Ising-type magnetic order. For repulsive interactions, the Ising antiferromagnetic order favors the occurrence of orbital currents spontaneously breaking time-reversal symmetry. By strongly varying the chemical potentials of the two chains, quantum phase transitions towards fully polarized (empty or full) fermionic chains occur. In the Kitaev model, the quantum critical point separating the topological superconducting phase and the polarized phase belongs to the universality class of the critical Ising model in two dimensions. When increasing the Coulomb interaction between chains, then we identify an additional phase corresponding to two critical Ising theories (or two chains of Majorana fermions). We confirm the existence of such a phase from exact mappings and from the concept of bipartite fluctuations. We show the existence of negative logarithmic corrections in the bipartite fluctuations, as a reminiscence of the quantum critical point in the Kitaev model. Other entanglement probes such as bipartite entropy and entanglement spectrum are also used to characterize the phase diagram. The limit of large interactions can be reached in an equivalent setup of ultracold atoms and Josephson junctions.
The Hubbard and spinless fermion chains are paradigms of strongly correlated systems, very well understood using the Bethe ansatz, density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), and field theory/renormalization group (RG) methods. They have been applied to one-dimensional materials and have provided important insights for understanding higher-dimensional cases. Recently, an interacting fermion model has been introduced, with possible applications to topological materials. It has a single Majorana fermion operator on each lattice site and interactions with the shortest possible range that involve four sites. We present a thorough analysis of the phase diagram of this model in one dimension using field-theory/RG and DMRG methods. It includes a gapped supersymmetric region and a gapless phase with coexisting Luttinger liquid and Ising degrees of freedom. In addition to a first-order transition, three critical points occur: tricritical Ising, Lifshitz, and a generalization of the commensurate-incommensurate transition. We also survey various gapped phases of the system that arise when the translation symmetry is broken by dimerization and find both trivial and topological phases with 0, 1, and 2 Majorana zero modes bound to the edges of the chain with open boundary conditions.
The zig-zag symmetry transition is a phase transition in 1D quantum wires, in which a Wigner lattice of electrons transitions to two staggered lattices. Pre-vious studies model this transition as a Luttinger liquid coupled to a Majorana fermion. The model exhibits interesting RG flows, involving quenching of ve-locities in subsectors of the theory. We suggest an extension of the model which replaces the Majorana fermion by a more general CFT; this includes an exper-imentally realizable case with two Majorana fermions. We analyse the RG flow both in field theory and using AdS/CFT techniques in the large central charge limit of the CFT. The model has a rich phase structure with new qualitative features, already in the two Majorana fermion case. The AdS/CFT calculation involves considering back reaction in space-time to capture subleading effects.
We investigate the von Neumann entanglement entropy and Schmidt gap in the vortex-free ground state of the Kitaev model on the honeycomb lattice for square/rectangular and cylindrical subsystems. We find that, for both the subsystems, the free-fermionic contribution to the entanglement entropy SE exhibits signatures of the phase transitions between the gapless and gapped phases. However, within the gapless phase, we find that SE does not show an expected monotonic behavior as a function of the coupling Jz between the suitably defined one-dimensional chains for either geometry; moreover, the system generically reaches a point of minimum entanglement within the gapless phase before the entanglement saturates or increases again until the gapped phase is reached. This may be attributed to the onset of gapless modes in the bulk spectrum and the competition between the correlation functions along various bonds. In the gapped phase, on the other hand, SE always monotonically varies with Jz independent of the subregion size or shape. Finally, further confirming the Li-Haldane conjecture, we find that the Schmidt gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ defined from the entanglement spectrum also signals the topological transitions but only if there are corresponding zero-energy Majorana edge states that simultaneously appear or disappear across the transitions. We analytically corroborate some of our results on entanglement entropy, the Schmidt gap, and the bulk-edge correspondence using perturbation theory.
The following thesis focuses on the scaling of entanglement entropy in lower dimensions and is divided into three main parts. Chapter 2 studies the thermal reduced density matrices in fermion and spin systems on ladders. Chapter 3 studies the many-body localization phase transition in a Rokhsar-Kivelson type wave function. Chapter 4 studies the subleading correction term of entanglement entropy in 2+1 dimensional scale invariant systems. Chapter 5 studies the bulk-boundary correspondence in 3 + 1 dimensional topological phases and its entanglement entropy. In chapter 2, we investigate the reduced density matrices for a model of free fermions on a two-leg ladder (gapped by the inter-chain tunneling operator) and in 1/2 spin systems on a ladder with a gapped ground state using exact solutions and several controlled approximations. We calculate the reduced density matrix and the entanglement entropy for a leg of the ladder (i.e. cut made between the chains). In the fermionic system we find the exact form of the reduced density matrix for one of the chains and determine the entanglement spectrum explicitly. Here we find that in the weak tunneling limit of the ladder the entanglement entropy of one chain of the gapped ladder has a simple and universal form dictated by conformal invariance. In the case of the spin system, we consider the strong coupling limit by using perturbation theory and get the reduced density matrix by the Schmidt decomposition. The entanglement entropies of a general gapped system of two coupled conformal field theories (in 1+1 dimensions) is discussed using the replica trick and scaling arguments. We show that 1) for a system with a bulk gap, the reduced density matrix has the form of a thermal density matrix, 2) the long-wavelength modes of one subsystem (a chain) of a gapped coupled system are always thermal, 3) the von Neumann entropy equals to the thermodynamic entropy of one chain, and 4) the bulk gap plays the role of effective temperature. In chapter 3, we construct a family of many-body wave functions to study the many-body localization phase transition. The wave functions have a Rokhsar-Kivelson form, in which the weight for the configurations are chosen from the Gibbs weights of a classical spin glass model, known as the Random Energy Model, multiplied by a random sign structure to represent a highly excited state. These wave functions show a phase transition into an MBL phase. In addition, we see three regimes of entanglement scaling with subsystem size: scaling with entanglement corresponding to an infinite temperature thermal phase, constant scaling, and a sub-extensive scaling between these limits. Near the phase transition point, the fluctuations of the Renyi entropies are non-Gaussian. We find that Renyi entropies with different Renyi index transition into the MBL phase at different points and have different scaling behavior, suggesting a multifractal behavior. In chapter 4, we study the universal scaling behavior of the entanglement entropy of critical theories in 2+1 dimensions. We specially consider two fermionic scale-invariant models, free massless Dirac fermions and a model of fermions with quadratic band touching, and numerically study the two-cylinder entanglement entropy of the models on the torus. We find that in both cases the entanglement entropy satisfies the area law and has the subleading term which is a scaling function of the aspect ratios of the cylindrical regions. We test the scaling of entanglement in both the free fermion models using three possible scaling functions for the subleading term derived from a) the quasi-one-dimensional conformal field theory, b) the bosonic quantum Lifshitz model, and c) the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence. For the later case we construct an analytic scaling function using holography, appropriate for critical theories with a gravitational dual description. We find that the subleading term in the fermionic models is well described, for a range of aspect ratios, by the scaling form derived from the quantum Lifshitz model as well as that derived using the AdS/CFT correspondence (in this case only for the Dirac model). For the case where the fermionic models are placed on a square torus we find the fit to the different scaling forms is in agreement to surprisingly high precision. In chapter 5, we discuss (2+1)-dimensional gapless surface theories of bulk (3+1)-dimensional topological phases, such as the BF theory at level K, and its generalization. In particular, we put these theories on a flat (2+1) dimensional torus T3 parameterized by its modular parameters, and compute the partition functions obeying various twisted boundary conditions. We show the partition functions are transformed into each other under SL(3, Z) modular transformations, and furthermore establish the bulk-boundary correspondence in (3+1) dimensions by matching the modular S and T matrices computed from the boundary field theories with those computed in the bulk. We propose the three-loop braiding statistics can be studied by constructing the modular S and T matrices from an appropriate boundary field theory. We also study the EE for 3 + 1- dimensional topological phase with or without three-loop braiding phase.