Local broken symmetry and spin transport in frustrated Heisenberg model in low dimension

L.S. Lima

S. N. Saadatmand

In spin lattices, frustration happens when there exists a competition between different terms of the Hamiltonian, which cannot be simultaneously minimized in all local physical bases. Frustration can destabilize the bipartite Neel order, which is the conventional groundstate of antiferromagnetic Heisenberg-type models in two dimensions. Hence, the focus of two-dimensional quantum magnetism studies has been directed toward elucidating the zero-temperature properties of Heisenberg-type models on the Archimedean lattices that exhibit geometrical frustration. This type of frustration is of great interest since it can lead to exotic forms of the quantum matter, such as topological spin-liquid (SL) and many-sublattice long-range-ordered phases. The spin-1/2 triangular Heisenberg model (THM) is a prototypical model with geometrical frustration, which has the highest coordination number of all Archimedean lattices. However, there exist two major, distinct difficulties for numerical methods to efficiently determine the groundstate properties of the THM: the immense dimension of the Hilbert space and the geometrical frustration phenomenon. In this thesis, to deal with such difficulties, we employ the state-of-the- art non-Abelian matrix product states (MPS) and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) methods. We exploit the symmetries of the Hamiltonian to reduce the working dimension of the Hilbert space and, to lessen the effects of the geometrical frustration, we depend on the local entanglement (area-law) nature of the MPS as it scales with the size of a lattice subspace with reduced spatial dimensions. In such a way, we thoroughly examine the phase diagram of the THM with nearest and next-nearest neighbor (NN and NNN) exchange couplings on finite- and infinite-length cylinders of widths up to 12 sites. In addition, we develop new numerical tools to analyze topological and symmetry-broken phases in the context of the SU(2)-symmetric translation-invariant MPS algorithm. We establish that on infinite cylinders, the anyonic sectors of a topological order can be classified through the fractionalization of global symmetries and degeneracy patterns of the entanglement spectrum (ES). On the other hand, we detect symmetry-breaking phase transitions by a combination of the correlation lengths and second and fourth cumulants of the magnetic order parameters, even though symmetry implies that the order parameter itself is strictly zero. Furthermore, the appearance of Nambu-Goldstone modes in the excitation spectrum can be detected using “tower of states” (TOS) levels in the momentum-resolved ES. By applying the new tools to the THM, we discover a variety of exotic groundstates such as a Z2-gauge toric-code-type topological order (with vison and spinon excitations), a NNN Majumdar-Gosh, and a long-range 120◦-ordered state.

Luca Capriotti, Sandro Sorella

We investigate the nonmagnetic phase of the spin-half frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the square lattice using exact diagonalization (up to 36 sites) and quantum Monte Carlo techniques (up to 144 sites). The spin gap and the susceptibilities for the most important crystal symmetry breaking operators are computed. A genuine and somehow unexpected "plaquette resonating valence bond," with spontaneously broken translation symmetry and no broken rotation symmetry, comes out from our numerical simulations as the most plausible ground state for J(2)/J(1) approximately 0.5.

P. Azaria, Bertrand Delamotte

Kazuo Hida, Ian K. Affleck

The magnetization plateau of the S = 1/2 frustrated Heisenberg chain with period 3 parity invariant exchange modulation is investigated by the bosonization and numerical exact diagonalization method. The ground state phase diagram at 1/3 of the saturated magnetization is obtained. Among three degenerate ↑↑↓-type plateau states in the uniform chain, two of them (↓↑↑↓↑↑⋅⋅⋅ and ↑↓↑↑↓↑⋅⋅⋅) turned out to be robust against the period 3 exchange modulation which favors the phase up to a critical value of the modulation amplitude ( = singlet dimer) resulting in the Z2 symmetry broken phase. Another ↑↑↓-type state with ↑↑↓↑↑↓⋅⋅⋅ configuration is stabilized for period 3 modulation with opposite sign. The transition between the -phase and Z2-broken phase is the Ising transition and that between the ↑↑↓↑↑↓⋅⋅⋅ -phase and Z2 broken phase is the first order transition. The spin configuration in each phase is numerically verified by applying the local symmetry breaking field.

Takashi Tonegawa, Makoto Kaburagi, Noriya Ichikawa +1 more