We examine n component spin systems with arbitrary two spin interactions (of unspecified range) within a general framework to highlight some new subtleties present in incommensurate systems. We determine the ground states of all translationally invariant O(n>1) systems and prove that barring commensurability effects they are always spiral- no other ground states are possible. We study the effect of thermal fluctuations on the ground states to discover a novel odd-even n effect. Soft spin analysis suggests that algebraic long range order is possible in certain frustrated incommensurate even n systems while their odd n counterparts exhibit an exponential decay of correlations. We illustrate that many frustrated incommensurate continuous spin systems display smectic like thermodynamics. We report on a generalized Mermin-Wagner-Coleman theorem for all two dimensional systems (of arbitrary range) with analytic kernels in momentum space. A new relation between generalization Mermin-Wagner-Coleman bounds and dynamics is further reported. We suggest a link between a generalized Mermin-Wagner-Coleman theorem to divergent decoherence (or bandwidth) time scale in the quantum context. A generalization of the Peierls bound for commensurate systems with long range interactions is also discussed. We conclude with a discussion of O(n) spin dynamics in the general case.
We examine n component spin systems with arbitrary two spin interactions (of unspecified range) within a general framework to highlight some new subtleties present in incommensurate systems. We determine the ground states of all translationally invariant O(n>1) systems and prove that barring commensurability effects they are always spiral- no other ground states are possible. We study the effect of thermal fluctuations on the ground states to discover a novel odd-even n effect. Soft spin analysis suggests that algebraic long range order is possible in certain frustrated incommensurate even n systems while their odd n counterparts exhibit an exponential decay of correlations. We illustrate that many frustrated incommensurate continuous spin systems display smectic like thermodynamics. We report on a generalized Mermin-Wagner-Coleman theorem for all two dimensional systems (of arbitrary range) with analytic kernels in momentum space. A new relation between generalization Mermin-Wagner-Coleman bounds and dynamics is further reported. We suggest a link between a generalized Mermin-Wagner-Coleman theorem to divergent decoherence (or bandwidth) time scale in the quantum context. A generalization of the Peierls bound for commensurate systems with long range interactions is also discussed. We conclude with a discussion of O(n) spin dynamics in the general case.
Here we examine O(n) systems with arbitrary two spin interactions (of unspecified range) within a general framework. We shall focus on translationally invariant interactions. In the this case, we determine the ground states of the O(n≥2) systems. We further illustrate how one may establish Peierls bounds for many Ising systems with long range interactions. We study the effect of thermal fluctuations on the ground states and derive the corresponding fluctuation integrals. The study of the thermal fluctuation spectra will lead us to discover a very interesting odd-even n (coupling-decoupling) effect. We will prove a generalized Mermin-Wagner-Coleman theorem for all two dimensional systems (of arbitrary range) with analytic kernels in k space. We will show that many three dimensional systems have smectic like thermodynamics. We will examine the topology of the ground state manifolds for both translationally invariant and spin glass systems. We conclude with a discussion of O(n) spin dynamics in the general case.
In this work we investigate themes related to many-body systems in which multiple ground states are accessible, a condition known as frustration. Frustration can arise in a number of contexts, and we consider the consequences of this situation with some examples from condensed-matter physics. In some magnetic materials interactions between spins are such that no single spin configuration provides a unique ground state. In the class of frustrated magnets where the number of ground states is extensive, thermal fluctuations are strong even at temperatures significantly below the interaction strength. At such temperatures spins are highly correlated, and small perturbations may have profound consequences. In this thesis we provide an example of this. By considering classical n-component spins with nearest-neigbour exchange on a frustrated octahedral lattice we show that – in the limit where exchange interactions are large – the system is in a disordered, correlated phase where correlations have the form of a dipole field. This is termed a Coulomb phase. From this phase we induce an ordering transition, lifting the degeneracy with weak, additional short-range interactions. By studying the transition in the solvable limit of n → ∞, we discover that the transition has identical thermodynamics to that of a magnetic system interacting through long-range, dipolar forces. Finally, we provide a more apposite characterisation of the transition, where the high-temperature side of the transition is described through the fluctuations of solenoidal fields, and the ordering corresponds to a condensation of these fields. In a separate part of the thesis, we investigate the influence of disorder on frustrated lattices. We study a two-dimensional tight-binding model with nearest-neighbour hopping and on-site disorder. Restricting the allowed states to being those from the low-lying manifold of ground states, the disorder feeds through to act as effective disorder in the hopping terms, which decay algebraically with distance. The quasi-long range nature of this effective hopping leads to a situation in which the resultant single-particle eigenstates are critical, and we probe their behaviour numerically with a transfer matrix calculation.
Some measurements have shown that the second-order exchange interaction is non-negligible in ferromagnetic compounds whose microscopic interactions are described by means of half-odd integer quantum spins. In these spin systems the ground state is either ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic when the bilinear exchange interaction is dominant. Instead, in ferromagnetic systems characterized by bilinear and biquadratic exchange interactions of comparable magnitude, the energy minimum occurs when spins are in a canting ground-state. To this aim, a one-dimensional (1D) quantum spin chain and a two-dimensional (2D) lattice of quantum spins subjected to periodic boundary conditions are modeled via the generalized quantum Heisenberg Hamiltonian containing, in addition to the isotropic and short-range bilinear exchange interaction of the Heisenberg type, a second-order interaction, the isotropic and short-range biquadratic exchange interaction between nearest-neighbors quantum spins. For these 1D and 2D quantum systems a generalization of the Mermin–Wagner–Hohenberg theorem (also known as Mermin–Wagner–Berezinksii or Coleman theorem) is given. It is demonstrated, by means of quantum statistical arguments, based on Bogoliubov’s inequality, that, at any finite temperature, (1) there is absence of long-range order and that (2) the law governing the vanishing of the order parameter is the same as in the bilinear case for both 1D and 2D quantum ferromagnetic systems. The physical implications of the absence of a spontaneous spin symmetry breaking in 1D spin chains and 2D spin lattices modeled via a generalized quantum Heisenberg Hamiltonian are discussed.
We study the ground-state properties of weakly frustrated Heisenberg ferrimagnetic chains with nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic exchange interactions and two types of alternating sublattice spins S1>S2, using 1/S spin-wave expansions, density-matrix renormalization group, and exact diagonalization techniques. It is argued that the zero-point spin fluctuations completely destroy the classical commensurate-incommensurate continuous transition. Instead, the long-range ferrimagnetic state disappears through a discontinuous transition to a singlet state at a larger value of the frustration parameter. In the ferrimagnetic phase we find a disorder point marking the onset of incommensurate real-space short-range spin-spin correlations.
Frustration in many-body spin systems is a situation where the spins cannot orient themselves to fully minimize the interactions with their neighbors. It is caused, in general, by competing interactions or by the lattice structure, as in the antiferromagnets on non-bipartite lattices. Over the years frustrated systems have been studied substantially, since frustration can destabilize the antiferromagnetic order, lead to different phases of matter and induce various exotic properties. Frustration can be caused also by a choice of boundary conditions, i.e. the lattice topology. For instance, a ring with an odd number of sites is non-bipartite, which makes antiferromagnets in this setting frustrated. The subject of this thesis are zero-temperature one-dimensional quantum systems exactly in this setting. The major content is discussing how such a simple setting can influence the antiferromagnetic order, by studying spin-1/2 chains with discrete symmetries, whose breaking is related to the onset of the order. After reviewing the known results on topological frustration, dealing with non-thermodynamic quantities, we develop an approach for studying symmetry breaking, that is both suitable for exact analytical computations and meaningful for discussing the order also in a finite system. It consists of the realization that many spin-1/2 chains without external magnetic fields, such as the quantum XY chain, possess anticommuting global symmetries when the number of lattice sites is an odd number, implying the ground-state degeneracy already in a finite system. In this framework, we discover that topological frustration, despite being induced only by the choice of boundary conditions and even/odd system size choice, can affect the magnetization in the thermodynamic limit and system's quantum phase transitions. We find that topological frustration can destroy local order, create a site-dependent magnetization that varies in space with an incommensurate pattern, induce a first-order quantum phase transition that is not present without frustration and modify the nature of a second-order transition, by destroying local order at both sides of the transition and preserving only non-local string order parameters. All these results indicate the incompleteness of the approach to quantum many-body systems, based on the Ginzburg-Landau theory, that tries to capture the properties of the system by taking the system size to infinity before computing the observables and neglects the influence of the chain length as a relevant scale. We find that topological frustration can affect also non-equilibrium properties, by considering a local quantum quench setup. Namely, we study the Loschmidt echo and find it displays qualitatively and quantitatively different behavior for antiferromagnetic rings with an even and odd number of sites. Most of all, the differences become clearer for large system sizes, thus allowing to distinguish in a simple out-of-equilibrium experiment a system made by a certain, large, number of spins from the one with a single additional spin. The thesis also contains a mathematical part. In studying order parameters of models mappable to free fermions, Toeplitz determinants with symbols that possess a part proportional to the delta function arise. We derive asymptotic formulas for this type of determinants.
We investigate the existence and the properties of fully separable (fully factorized) ground states in quantum spin systems. Exploiting techniques of quantum information and entanglement theory, we extend a recently introduced method and construct a general, self-contained theory of ground state factorization in frustration-free quantum spin models defined on lattices in any spatial dimension and for interactions of arbitrary range. We show that, quite generally, nonexactly solvable translationally invariant models in presence of an external uniform magnetic field can admit exact, fully factorized ground state solutions. Unentangled ground states occur at finite values of the Hamiltonian parameters satisfying well-defined balancing conditions between the applied field and the interaction strengths. These conditions are analytically determined together with the type of magnetic orderings compatible with factorization and the corresponding values of the fundamental observables such as energy and magnetization. The method is applied to a series of examples of increasing complexity, including translationally invariant models with short, long, and infinite ranges of interaction, as well as systems with spatial anisotropies, in lower and higher dimensions. We also illustrate how the general method, besides yielding a large series of exact results for complex models in any dimension, recovers, as particular cases, the results previously achieved on simple models in low dimensions exploiting direct methods based on factorized mean-field ansatz.