Quantum Spin Chains

Hans-Peter Eckle

Abstract This chapter presents the extension of the Bethe ansatz to finite temperature, the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz, for the antiferromagnetic isotropic Heisenberg quantum spin chain, the XXX quantum spin chain. It discusses how the added complications of this model arise from the more complicated structure of excitations of the quantum spin chain, the complex string excitations, which have to be included in the Bethe ansatz thermodynamics. It derives the integral equations of the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz for the XXX quantum spin chain and mentions explicit formulas for the free energy of the quantum spin chain and some interesting physical quantities, especially making contact with predictions of conformal symmetry.

A. Zheludev

Marcos Crichigno, Prakash, Anupam

We consider the question of what quantum spin chains naturally encode in their Hilbert space. It turns out that quantum spin chains are rather rich systems, naturally encoding solutions to various problems in combinatorics, group theory, and algebraic geometry. In the case of the XX Heisenberg spin chain these are given by skew Kostka numbers, skew characters of the symmetric group, and Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. As we show, this is revealed by a fermionic representation of the theory of "quantized" symmetric functions formulated by Fomin and Greene, which provides a powerful framework for constructing operators extracting this data from the Hilbert space of quantum spin chains. Furthermore, these operators are diagonalized by the Bethe basis of the quantum spin chain. Underlying this is the fact that quantum spin chains are examples of "quantum integrable systems." This is somewhat analogous to bosons encoding permanents and fermions encoding determinants. This points towards considering quantum integrable systems, and the combinatorics associated with them, as potentially interesting targets for quantum computers.

Naoto Nagaosa

John M. Nichol

Hans-Peter Eckle

Abstract This chapter introduces the Heisenberg model, a fully quantum mechanical model that describes the magnetism of localized magnetic moments. The one-dimensional version of the Heisenberg model, the Heisenberg quantum spin chain, provides a good picture of magnetic materials that belong to a class of insulating magnetic materials where the interaction of the magnetic moments in one particular direction is much larger than in the perpendicular directions, and which can be described with high accuracy as quasi- one-dimensional magnets. A detailed description of the Heisenberg quantum spin chain is followed by a discussion of its various special cases, in particular the special case of the anisotropic Heisenberg quantum spin chain, the so-called XXZ quantum spin chain. It considers the solution of eigenvalue problem of this quantum spin and leads to Bethe’s conjecture for the wave function.