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arXiv:2407.06713 · Physical Review Research

Luttinger liquid tensor network: Sine versus tangent dispersion of massless Dirac fermions

V. A. Zakharov, Stefano Polla, A. Donís Vela, Patrick Emonts, M. J. Pacholski, J. Tworzydło, C. W. J. Beenakker

Published Oct 23, 2024• 5 citations
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Abstract

To apply the powerful many-body techniques of tensor networks to massless Dirac fermions, one wants to discretize the p · σ Hamiltonian and construct a matrix-product-operator (MPO) representation. We compare two alternative discretization schemes, one with a sine dispersion, the other with a tangent dispersion, applied to a one-dimensional Luttinger liquid with Hubbard interaction. Both types of lattice fermions allow for an exact MPO representation of low bond dimension, so they are efficiently computable, but only the tangent dispersion gives a power law decay of the propagator in agreement with the continuum limit: The sine dispersion is gapped by the interactions, evidenced by an exponentially decaying propagator. Our construction of a tensor network with an unpaired Dirac cone works around the fermion-doubling obstruction by exploiting the fact that the Hamiltonian of tangent fermions permits a generalized eigenproblem. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.6.043059

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To apply the powerful many-body techniques of tensor networks to massless Dirac fermions, one wants to discretize the p · σ Hamiltonian and construct a matrix-product-operator (MPO) representation. We compare two alternative discretization schemes, one with a sine dispersion, the other with a tangent dispersion, applied to a one-dimensional Luttinger liquid with Hubbard interaction. Both types of lattice fermions allow for an exact MPO representation of low bond dimension, so they are efficiently computable, but only the tangent dispersion gives a power law decay of the propagator in agreement with the continuum limit: The sine dispersion is gapped by the interactions, evidenced by an exponentially decaying propagator. Our construction of a tensor network with an unpaired Dirac cone works around the fermion-doubling obstruction by exploiting the fact that the Hamiltonian of tangent fermions permits a generalized eigenproblem. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We extend a recently developed "tangent fermion" method to discretize the Hamiltonian of a helical Luttinger liquid on a one-dimensional lattice, including two-particle backscattering processes that may open a gap in the spectrum. The fermion-doubling obstruction of the sine dispersion is avoided by working with a tangent dispersion, preserving the time-reversal symmetry of the Hamiltonian. The numerical results from a tensor network calculation on a finite lattice confirm the expectation from infinite-system analytics, that a gapped phase with spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry emerges when the Fermi level is tuned to the Dirac point and the Luttinger parameter crosses a critical value.
Understanding interactions in quantum many-body systems remains one of the most profound and difficult challenges in condensed matter physics. While free particle systems can be solved through single-particle techniques, the introduction of interactions turns the problem essentially many-body and quickly intractable. The Hilbert space grows exponentially, and traditional approaches become useless. To deal with this, one typically turns to numerical methods by discretizing the system on a lattice. This approach generally works well for many 1D problems, including those described by Schrödinger equation. However, when it comes to massless Dirac fermions with protected chirality, the situation becomes more complicated. Any naive discretization inevitably runs into the fermion doubling problem, formalized by the Nielsen–Ninomiya theorem, which forbids a straightforward lattice realization of a single chiral mode without either breaking symmetry or introducing unphysical degrees of freedom. My thesis is motivated by this problem: the need to describe 1D interacting systems, and the difficulty of doing so numerically due to these fundamental obstacles. The main focus of this work is to develop and explore lattice-based numerical methods for strongly correlated chiral fermions in one dimension, with the Luttinger liquid as a central case study.
The Luttinger model is a paradigm for the breakdown due to interactions of the Fermi liquid description of one-dimensional massless Dirac fermions. Attempts to discretize the model on a one-dimensional lattice have failed to reproduce the established bosonization results because of the fermion-doubling obstruction: a local and symmetry-preserving discretization of the Hamiltonian introduces a spurious second species of low-energy excitations, while a nonlocal discretization opens a single-particle gap at the Dirac point. Here, we show how to work around this obstruction by discretizing both space and time to obtain a local Lagrangian for a helical Luttinger liquid with Hubbard interaction. The approach enables quantum Monte Carlo simulations that preserve the topological protection of an unpaired Dirac cone.
It appears that the tensor network ansatz, while not quite complete, is an efficient coordinate system for the tiny subset of a many-body Hilbert space which can be realized as a low energy state of a local Hamiltonian.However, we don't fully understand precisely which phases are captured by the tensor network ansatz, how to compute their physical observables (even numerically), or how to compute a tensor network representation for a ground state given a microscopic Hamiltonian. These questions are algorithmic in nature, but their resolution is intimately related to understanding the nature of quantum entanglement in many-body systems.For this reason it is useful to compute the tensor network representation of various `model' wavefunctions representative of different phases of matter; this allows us to understand how the entanglement properties of each phase are expressed in the tensor network ansatz, and can serve as test cases for algorithm development.Condensed matter physics has many illuminating model wavefunctions, such as Laughlin's celebrated wave function for the fractional quantum Hall effect, the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer wave function for superconductivity, and Anderson's resonating valence bond ansatz for spin liquids.This thesis presents some results on exact tensor network representations of these model wavefunctions. In addition, a tensor network representation is given for the time evolution operator of a long-range one-dimensional Hamiltonian, which allows one to numerically simulate the time evolution of power-law interacting spin chains as well as two-dimensional strips and cylinders.
Recent work by Wu et al. [arXiv:1910.11011] proposed a numerical method, so-called matrix product operator--matrix product state (MPO-MPS) method, by which several types of quantum many-body wave functions, in particular, the projected Fermi sea state, can be efficiently represented as a tensor network. In this paper, we generalize the MPO-MPS method to study Gutzwiller projected paired states of fermions, where the maximally localized Wannier orbitals for Bogoliubov quasiparticles/quasiholes have been adapted to improve the computational performance. The study of SO(3)SO(3)SO(3)-symmetric spin-1 chains reveals that this new method has better performance than variational Monte Carlo for gapped states and similar performance for gapless states. Moreover, we demonstrate that dynamic correlation functions can be easily evaluated by this method cooperating with other MPS-based accurate approaches, such as the Chebyshev MPS method.