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arXiv:2501.19362

On the Ising Phase Transition in the Infrared-Divergent Spin Boson Model

Volker Betz, Hinrichs, Benjamin, Mino Nicola Kraft, Steffen Polzer

Published Jan 31, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

We prove absence of ground states in the infrared-divergent spin boson model at large coupling. Our key argument reduces the proof to verifying long range order in the dual one-dimensional continuum Ising model, i.e., to showing that the respective two point function is lower bounded by a strictly positive constant. We can then use known results from percolation theory to establish long range order at large coupling. Combined with the known existence of ground states at small coupling, our result proves that the spin boson model undergoes a phase transition with respect to the coupling strength. We also present an expansion for the vacuum overlap of the spin boson ground state in terms of the Ising $n$-point functions, which implies that the phase transition is unique, i.e., that there is a critical coupling constant below which a ground state exists and above which none can exist.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2501.19362

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We prove absence of ground states in the infrared-divergent spin boson model at large coupling. Our key argument reduces the proof to verifying long range order in the dual one-dimensional continuum Ising model, i.e., to showing that the respective two point function is lower bounded by a strictly positive constant. We can then use known results from percolation theory to establish long range order at large coupling. Combined with the known existence of ground states at small coupling, our result proves that the spin boson model undergoes a phase transition with respect to the coupling strength. We also present an expansion for the vacuum overlap of the spin boson ground state in terms of the Ising nnn-point functions, which implies that the phase transition is unique, i.e., that there is a critical coupling constant below which a ground state exists and above which none can exist.
We review recent results on the existence of ground states for the infrared-critical spin boson model, which describes the interaction of a massless bosonic field with a two-state quantum system. Explicitly, we derive a critical coupling λc>0λ_{\mathsf c}>0λc​>0 such that the spin boson model exhibits a ground state for coupling constants λλλ with ∣λ∣<λc|λ|<λ_{\mathsf c}∣λ∣<λc​. The proof combines a Feynman-Kac-Nelson formula for the spin boson model with external magnetic field, a 1D-Ising model correlation bound and a compactness argument in Fock space. Elaborating on the connection to a long-range 1D-Ising model, we briefly discuss the conjecture that the spin boson model does not have a ground state at large coupling. This note is based on joint work with David Hasler and Oliver Siebert.
Abstract We study the second-order phase transition in the d -dimensional Ising model with long-range interactions decreasing as a power of the distance 1 / r d + s . For s below some known value s ∗ , the transition is described by a conformal field theory without a local stress tensor operator, with critical exponents varying continuously as functions of s . At s = s ∗ , the phase transition crosses over to the short-range universality class. While the location s ∗ of this crossover has been known for 40 years, its physics has not been fully understood, the main difficulty being that the standard description of the long-range critical point is strongly coupled at the crossover. In this paper we propose another field-theoretic description which, on the contrary, is weakly coupled near the crossover. We use this description to clarify the nature of the crossover and make predictions about the critical exponents. That the same long-range critical point can be reached from two different UV descriptions provides a new example of infrared duality.
The effective theories for many quantum phase transitions can be mapped onto those of classical transitions. Here we show that the naive mapping fails for the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model which describes a two-level system coupled to a bosonic bath with power-law spectral density, J(omega) proportional, variantomega(s). Using an epsilon expansion we prove that this model has a quantum transition controlled by an interacting fixed point at small s, and support this by numerical calculations. In contrast, the corresponding classical long-range Ising model is known to display mean-field transition behavior for 0 < s < 1/2, controlled by a noninteracting fixed point. The failure of the quantum-classical mapping is argued to arise from the long-ranged interaction in imaginary time in the quantum model.
The d-dimensional long-range Ising model, defined by spin-spin interactions decaying with the distance as the power 1/r^{d+s}, admits a second-order phase transition with continuously varying critical exponents. At s=s_{*}, the phase transition crosses over to the usual short-range universality class. The standard field-theoretic description of this family of models is strongly coupled at the crossover. We find a new description, which is instead weakly coupled near the crossover, and use it to compute critical exponents. The existence of two complementary UV descriptions of the same long-range fixed point provides a novel example of infrared duality.
An analytic ground state is proposed for the unbiased spin-boson Hamiltonian, which is non-Gaussian and beyond the Silbey-Harris ground state with lower ground state energy. The infrared catastrophe in Ohmic and sub-Ohmic bosonic bath plays an important role in determining the degeneracy of the ground state. We show that the infrared divergence associated with the displacement of the nonadiabatic modes in bath may be removed from the proposed ground state for the coupling α < αc. Then αc is the quantum critical point of a transition from non-degenerate to degenerate ground state and our calculated αc agrees with previous numerical results.