Abstract The zig-zag symmetry transition is a phase transition in 1D quantum wires, in which a Wigner lattice of electrons transitions to two staggered lattices. Previous studies model this transition as a Luttinger liquid coupled to a Majorana fermion. The model exhibits interesting RG flows, involving quenching of velocities in subsectors of the theory. We suggest an extension of the model which replaces the Majorana fermion by a more general CFT; this includes an experimentally realizable case with two Majorana fermions. We analyse the RG flow both in field theory and using AdS/CFT techniques in the large central charge limit of the CFT. The model has a rich phase structure with new qualitative features, already in the two Majorana fermion case. The AdS/CFT calculation involves considering back reaction in space-time to capture subleading effects.
The Hubbard and spinless fermion chains are paradigms of strongly correlated systems, very well understood using the Bethe ansatz, density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), and field theory/renormalization group (RG) methods. They have been applied to one-dimensional materials and have provided important insights for understanding higher-dimensional cases. Recently, an interacting fermion model has been introduced, with possible applications to topological materials. It has a single Majorana fermion operator on each lattice site and interactions with the shortest possible range that involve four sites. We present a thorough analysis of the phase diagram of this model in one dimension using field-theory/RG and DMRG methods. It includes a gapped supersymmetric region and a gapless phase with coexisting Luttinger liquid and Ising degrees of freedom. In addition to a first-order transition, three critical points occur: tricritical Ising, Lifshitz, and a generalization of the commensurate-incommensurate transition. We also survey various gapped phases of the system that arise when the translation symmetry is broken by dimerization and find both trivial and topological phases with 0, 1, and 2 Majorana zero modes bound to the edges of the chain with open boundary conditions.
We revisit the phase diagram of the dimerized XXZ spin-
21 chain with nearest-neighbor couplings which was studied numerically by Mondal et al. [Phys. Rev. B 106, L201106 (2022)]. The model has isotropic
XY couplings which have a uniform value and
ZZ couplings which have a dimerized form, with strengths
Ja and
Jb on alternate bonds. We find a rich phase diagram in the region of positive
Ja,Jb. We provide a detailed understanding of the different phases and associated quantum phase transitions using a combination of mean-field theory, low-energy effective Hamiltonians, renormalization group calculations employing the technique of bosonization, and numerical calculations using the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method. The phase diagram consists of two Ising paramagnetic phases called
IPM0 and ${\mathrm{IPM}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$, and a phase with Ising Neel (IN) order; all these phases are gapped. The phases
IPM0 and ${\mathrm{IPM}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$ are separated by a gapless phase transition line $0\ensuremath{\le}{J}_{a}={J}_{b}\ensuremath{\le}1$---the well-known Tomonaga Luttinger liquid captured by a conformal field theory (CFT) with central charge
c=1. In contrast, there are two phase transition lines separating
IPM0 or the ${\mathrm{IPM}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$ from IN that are described by
c=21 CFTs and correspond to quantum Ising transitions. In fact, the
c=1 line bifurcates into the two
c=21 lines at the point
Ja=Jb=1; the shape of the bifurcation is found analytically using RG calculations. A symmetry analysis shows that
IPM0 is a topologically trivial phase while ${\mathrm{IPM}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$ is a time-reversal symmetry-protected topological phase (SPT) with spin-
21 states at the two ends of an open system. A gap opens in the low-energy spectrum whenever one moves away from one of the phase transition lines; the scaling of the gap with the distance from a transition line is found analytically using the RG method. The numerical results obtained by the DMRG method are in good agreement with the analytical results. Further, we show that useful insights into the nature of the phase diagram of the above Hamiltonian, particularly the SPT as well as the phase transitions, is obtained via Kramers-Wannier duality to a deformed quantum Ashkin-Teller model. Finally, we propose experimental platforms for testing our results.
We present extensive calculation and the results of quantum Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition for interacting helical liquid system. This system shows the quantum BKT transition for the different physical situation which we present by two model Hamiltonians. We derive the renormalization group (RG) equations explicitly and present the flow lines behavior. We also present RG flow lines based on the exact solution. We observe that the Majorana fermion zero modes physics and the gapped Ising phase of the system. We also observe that the evidence of gapless Luttinger liquid phase as a common phase for both quantum BKT transitions.
Majorana zero modes (MZM-s) occurring at the edges of a one-dimensional (1D),
p-wave, spinless superconductor, in the absence of fluctuations of the phase of the superconducting order parameter, are quintessential examples of topologically protected zero-energy modes occurring at the edges of 1D symmetry-protected topological phases. In this work, we numerically investigate the fate of the topological phase in the presence of phase fluctuations using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) technique. To that end, we consider a one-dimensional array of MZM-s on mesoscopic superconducting islands at zero temperature. Cooper-pair and MZM-assisted single-electron tunneling, together with finite charging energy of the mesoscopic islands, give rise to a rich phase diagram of this model. We show that the system can be in either a Mott-insulating phase, a Luttinger liquid (LL) phase of Cooper pairs, or a second gapless phase. In contrast to the LL of Cooper pairs, this second phase is characterized by nonlocal string correlation functions which decay algebraically due to gapless charge-
e excitations. The three phases are separated from each other by phase transitions of either Kosterlitz-Thouless or Ising type. Using a Jordan-Wigner transformation, we map the system to a generalized Bose-Hubbard model with two types of hopping and use DMRG to analyze the different phases and the phase transitions.
We introduce a new family of one dimensional liquids, which we label as \'\'Staggered-Liquids\'\', in the phase diagram of the 1D Kondo-Heisenberg model. It encompasses three distinct spin gapped liquids and a new Luttinger liquid phase. A Staggered Liquid is characterized by gapless modes with \'\'large fermi-sea\'\' signature in the charge density wave (CDW) mode, and in that the superconducting order involves the near condensation of charge-2e Cooper pairs with finite center of mass momentum. In particular, the conventional gapless
2kF CDW and
k=0 pairing modes are absent. In the process, we analytically derive the phase transition from an intermediate coupling spin gap phase to the strong coupling gapless LL phase of the Kondo-Heisenberg lattice model.