Condensed matter is the area of physics which deals with the phases of matter in condensed form with an aim to understand the properties of these phases and the transition between them based on the known laws of physics. This is usually done by figuring out some characteristic properties of the phase which sets it apart from the others, e.g., symmetry, topological order, entanglement, etc. The most common way of characterizing the transition between these phases is the broken symmetry. In this classification method, one finds the symmetry which phase breaks spontaneously during the transition and develops a local long-range order. This is the famous Landau’s symmetry breaking paradigm [ 1 ]. Landau’s symmetry breaking theory is a phenomenological theory which describes the transition from a symmetric phase (high-temperature phases) to a less symmetric/broken symmetry phase (phases at low temperature). A zero-temperature phase transition is also possible (by tuning the parameters of the Hamiltonian) and is known as quantum phase transition [ 2 ]. Although there were other paradigms of phase transition available, like Anderson localization [ 3 ], Berezinsky—Kosterlitz—Thouless transition [ 4 ] (broken symmetry but no long-range order), etc., Landau’s spontaneous symmetry breaking dominated over the others.
We investigate numerically the finite-temperature phase diagrams of the extended Bose-Hubbard model in a two-dimensional square lattice. In particular, we focus on the melting of supersolid phases of two different crystal orderings, stripe and star orders, arising from the competition of the nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions in the vicinity of quarter filling. The two crystal orders are the result of broken translational symmetry in either one or in both
x and
y directions. The broken gauge symmetry of the supersolids are found to be restored via a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition while the broken translational symmetries are restored via a single second-order phase transition, instead of two second-order transitions in the Ising universality class. On the other hand, the phase transitions between the star and stripe orders are first order in nature.
We investigate two concrete cases of phase transitions breaking a subsystem symmetry. The models are two classical compass models featuring line-flip and plane-flip symmetries and correspond to special limits of a Heisenberg-Kitaev Hamiltonian on a cubic lattice. We show that these models experience a hybrid symmetry breaking by which the system display distinct symmetry broken patterns in different submanifolds. For instance, the system may look magnetic within a chain or plane but nematic-like when observing from one dimensionality higher. We fully characterize the symmetry-broken phases by a set of subdimensional order parameters and confirm numerically both cases undergo a non-standard first-order phase transition. Our results provide new insights into phase transitions involving subsystem symmetries and generalize the notion of conventional spontaneous symmetry breaking.