Abstract Here we employ trace distance and bipartite correlations as the detectors for quantum phase transitions (QPTs). Their performances behaving in Ising spin chains with Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya (DM) interaction and an external transverse field are studied, respectively. Exploiting the quantum renormalization group method, all the detectors can effectively characterize the QPTs at the critical points. Moreover, the block–block correlations existing in the multipartite spin systems never violate the Bell inequality with the DM interaction, whereas they are enough to violate this inequality under the transverse field. Finally, we detail the nonanalytic and scaling behavior of the trace distance, which is tightly connected to the critical features of spin systems.
We examine the ability of quantum discord (QD) and entanglements (concurrence, EoF and negativity) to detect the critical points associated to quantum phase transitions (QPTs) for XY models, i.e., the isotropic XY model with three-spin interactions at zero temperature, and the anisotropic XY model in a transverse magnetic field h at finite temperatures. For the case of zero temperature, we found that both entanglements and QD can spotlight the critical points of QPTs for these two models. Moreover, QD versus distance M exhibits the long-range behavior of quantum correlation for the anisotropic XY model, while entanglement is short-ranged. For the case of finite temperatures, we found that negativity has the same behaviors with concurrence at or near transition points. Moreover, QD for the anisotropic XY model can increase with temperature even in the absence of a magnetic field.
The ground state of interacting spin chains in external magnetic fields can undergo a quantum phase transition (QPT) characterized by dramatic changes at a critical value of the magnetic field. In this paper, we use Bell-type inequalities to study the multipartite correlations (including multipartite entanglement and multipartite nonlocality in an
n-spin subsystem) in the QPT of an infinite
XY chain. An efficient numerical optimization procedure is proposed to figure out the violation measure
Mn of the inequalities. For $n\ensuremath{\le}7$, the magnetic-field ($\ensuremath{\lambda}$) dependence of
Mn is studied. We find the derivative of
Mn is divergent exactly at the QPT point ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{c}=1$ for any
n. In addition, with the increase of
n,
Mn converges quickly for $\ensuremath{\lambda}<{\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{c}$ and converges very slowly for $\ensuremath{\lambda}>{\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{c}$, which can be regarded as another signal for the QPT. Furthermore, in the vicinity of ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{c}$, high-order Bell-type inequalities will be violated as long as
n is large enough. This indicates that high-level multipartite correlation will be present when the system is in the vicinity of the QPT point. Nevertheless, genuine
n-partite entanglement or genuine
n-partite nonlocality is not observed in the QPT.
We derive a general relation between the nonanalyticities of the ground state energy and those of a subclass of the multipartite generalized global entanglement (GGE) measure defined by de Oliveira et al. [Phys. Rev. A 73, 010305(R) (2006)] for many-particle systems. We show that GGE signals both a critical point location and the order of a quantum phase transition (QPT). We also show that GGE allows us to study the relation between multipartite entanglement and QPTs, suggesting that multipartite but not bipartite entanglement is favored at the critical point. Finally, using GGE we were able, at a second-order QPT, to define a diverging entanglement length (EL) in terms of the usual correlation length. We exemplify this with the XY spin-1/2 chain and show that the EL is half the correlation length.
Pairwise quantum discord (QD) and classical correlation (CC) are studied in the
XY spin chain with three-spin interaction. We analyze their capability in detecting quantum phase transitions (QPTs) at both zero and finite temperatures and find that the pairwise QD of two neighboring spins is more reliable than that of any other distances in identifying QPTs. Both the QD and CC detect quantum critical points associated with first- and higher-order QPTs caused by field and three-spin interactions at finite temperatures. In addition, we find a different finite-size scaling behavior for QD from previous reports for the transverse field Ising case and show some interesting phenomena of QD and entanglement of formation for finite temperatures.
We study the properties of multipartite quantum correlation (MQC) in a one-dimensional spin-1/2
XY chain, where the three-spin reduced states are focused on and the four introduced MQC measures are based on entanglement negativity and entanglement of formation. It is found that, even in the Ising case, the three-spin subsystems have long-range MQCs and the tripartite quantum correlations beyond the nearest-neighbor three spins can detect the quantum phase transition and obey the finite-size scaling around the critical point. Furthermore, in the
XY model, we show that the two selected MQCs can indicate exactly the factorization point of the ground state for the anisotropic model in the thermodynamic and finite-size cases. Moreover, the spatial distribution of MQC based on entanglement negativity can attain a much larger range by tuning the anisotropic parameter, and the newly defined MQC based on entanglement of formation can detect the bound entanglement in the three-spin subsystems when the entanglement negativity loses its efficacy.