Symmetry-projected wave function methods capture static correlation by breaking and restoring the symmetries of a system. In this article, we present the symmetry-projected spin antisymmetrized geminal power (spin-AGP) state projected onto space group symmetry as well as complex conjugation, spin-flip, and time-reversal symmetries. The method is benchmarked on the 1D XXZ model and the 2D J1 - J2 model with square and triangular lattices. Our results indicate that symmetry projection methods provide a powerful tool for frustrated spin systems.
We formulate Grover's unstructured search algorithm as a chiral quantum walk, where transitioning in one direction has a phase conjugate to transitioning in the opposite direction. For small phases, this breaking of time-reversal symmetry is too small to significantly affect the evolution: the system still approximately evolves in its ground and first excited states, rotating to the marked vertex in time πN/2. Increasing the phase does not change the runtime, but rather changes the support for the 2D subspace, so the system evolves in its first and second excited states, or its second and third excited states, and so forth. Apart from the critical phases corresponding to these transitions in the support, which become more frequent as the phase grows, this reveals that our model of quantum search is robust against time-reversal symmetry breaking.
Symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases are gapped short-range-entangled quantum phases with a symmetry G. They can all be smoothly connected to the same trivial product state if we break the symmetry. The Haldane phase of spin-1 chain is the first example of SPT phases which is protected by SO(3) spin rotation symmetry. The topological insulator is another example of SPT phases which are protected by U(1) and time-reversal symmetries. In this paper, we show that interacting bosonic SPT phases can be systematically described by group cohomology theory: Distinct d-dimensional bosonic SPT phases with on-site symmetry G (which may contain antiunitary time-reversal symmetry) can be labeled by the elements in H1+d[G,UT(1)], the Borel (1+d)-group-cohomology classes of G over the G module UT(1). Our theory, which leads to explicit ground-state wave functions and commuting projector Hamiltonians, is based on a new type of topological term that generalizes the topological $\ensuremath{\theta}$ term in continuous nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models to lattice nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models. The boundary excitations of the nontrivial SPT phases are described by lattice nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models with a nonlocal Lagrangian term that generalizes the Wess-Zumino-Witten term for continuous nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models. As a result, the symmetry G must be realized as a non-on-site symmetry for the low-energy boundary excitations, and those boundary states must be gapless or degenerate. As an application of our result, we can use ${\mathcal{H}}^{1+d}[U(1)\ensuremath{\rtimes}{Z}_{2}^{T},{U}_{T}(1)]$ to obtain interacting bosonic topological insulators (protected by time reversal Z2T and boson number conservation), which contain one nontrivial phase in one-dimensional (1D) or 2D and three in 3D. We also obtain interacting bosonic topological superconductors (protected by time-reversal symmetry only), in term of H1+d[Z2T,UT(1)], which contain one nontrivial phase in odd spatial dimensions and none for even dimensions. Our result is much more general than the above two examples, since it is for any symmetry group. For example, we can use ${\mathcal{H}}^{1+d}[U(1)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{Z}_{2}^{T},{U}_{T}(1)]$ to construct the SPT phases of integer spin systems with time-reversal and U(1) spin rotation symmetry, which contain three nontrivial SPT phases in 1D, none in 2D, and seven in 3D. Even more generally, we find that the different bosonic symmetry breaking short-range-entangled phases are labeled by the following three mathematical objects: $({G}_{H},{G}_{\ensuremath{\Psi}},{\mathcal{H}}^{1+d}[{G}_{\ensuremath{\Psi}},{U}_{T}(1)])$, where GH is the symmetry group of the Hamiltonian and ${G}_{\ensuremath{\Psi}}$ the symmetry group of the ground states.