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arXiv:cond-mat/0611390 · Physical Review B

Devil’s staircases, quantum dimer models, and stripe formation in strong coupling models of quantum frustration

Stefanos Papanikolaou, Kumar S. Raman, Eduardo Fradkin

Published Mar 5, 2007• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We construct a two-dimensional microscopic model of interacting quantum dimers that displays an infinite number of periodic striped phases in its $T=0$ phase diagram. The phases form an incomplete devil's staircase and the period becomes arbitrarily large as the staircase is traversed. The Hamiltonian has purely short-range interactions, does not break any symmetries of the underlying square lattice, and is generic in that it does not involve the fine-tuning of a large number of parameters. Our model, a quantum mechanical analog of the Pokrovsky-Talapov model of fluctuating domain walls in two-dimensional classical statistical mechanics, provides a mechanism by which striped phases with large periods compared to the lattice spacing can, in principle, form in frustrated quantum magnetic systems with only short-ranged interactions and no explicitly broken symmetries.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.75.094406

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We construct a two-dimensional microscopic model of interacting quantum dimers that displays an infinite number of periodic striped phases in its T=0T=0T=0 phase diagram. The phases form an incomplete devil's staircase and the period becomes arbitrarily large as the staircase is traversed. The Hamiltonian has purely short-range interactions, does not break any symmetries of the underlying square lattice, and is generic in that it does not involve the fine-tuning of a large number of parameters. Our model, a quantum mechanical analog of the Pokrovsky-Talapov model of fluctuating domain walls in two-dimensional classical statistical mechanics, provides a mechanism by which striped phases with large periods compared to the lattice spacing can, in principle, form in frustrated quantum magnetic systems with only short-ranged interactions and no explicitly broken symmetries.
The devil's staircase is a fractal structure that characterizes the ground state of one-dimensional classical lattice gases with long-range repulsive convex interactions. Its plateaus mark regions of stability for specific filling fractions which are controlled by a chemical potential. Typically, such a staircase has an explicit particle-hole symmetry; i.e., the staircase at more than half filling can be trivially extracted from the one at less than half filling by exchanging the roles of holes and particles. Here, we introduce a quantum spin chain with competing short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions, i.e., a nonconvex potential. In the classical limit the ground state features generalized Wigner crystals that--depending on the filling fraction--are composed of either dimer particles or dimer holes, which results in an emergent complete devil's staircase without explicit particle-hole symmetry of the underlying microscopic model. In our system the particle-hole symmetry is lifted due to the fact that the staircase is controlled through a two-body interaction rather than a one-body chemical potential. The introduction of quantum fluctuations through a transverse field melts the staircase and ultimately makes the system enter a paramagnetic phase. For intermediate transverse field strengths, however, we identify a region where the density-density correlations suggest the emergence of quasi-long-range order. We discuss how this physics can be explored with Rydberg-dressed atoms held in a lattice.
Frustrated spin-1/2 model with all-antiferromagnetic exchange on Shastry-Sutherland lattice (SSL) has been extensively explored, and in this work we study the quantum phase diagram of isotropic Heisenberg spin- 1 / 2 model on the SSL with ferromagnetic exchange interactions along leg, and antiferromagnetic couplings along the diagonal bonds ( J ). Using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and exact diagonalization calculations, we identify four distinct ground-state (gs) phases for this frustrated spin-1/2 model: stripe ( π , 0 ) , stripe ( 0 , π ) , ferromagnetic, and spiral-dimer phases. In the spiral-dimer phase the gs can exhibit dimer formation along the diagonal bonds with or without spins spiral along the x axis or y axis in different parameter regime and these states are connected through crossovers. There is a continuous transition between stripe with a long-range spin-spin correlations and spiral-dimer phase with a short-range correlations. An effective spin parameter is introduced to accurately determine the phase boundaries. Our DMRG results differ significantly from previous Schwinger boson mean-field theory predictions. The spiral phase occurs in a narrow range of the parameter space and shows short-range correlations in the system.
We present quantum phase diagrams for the antiferromagnetic long-range Ising model with a linear coupling to a single bosonic mode on the square and triangular lattice. For zero coupling, the ground-state magnetization forms a devil's staircase structure of magnetization plateaux as a function of a longitudinal field. Apart from a paramagnetic superradiant phase with a finite photon density at strong light-matter couplings, the long-range interactions lead to a plethora of intermediate phases that break the translational symmetry and have a finite photon density at the same time. We apply an adaption of the unit-cell-based mean-field calculations, which captures all possible magnetic unit cells up to a chosen extent. Further, we exploit an exact mapping of the non-superradiant phases to an effective Dicke model to calculate upper bounds for phase transitions towards superradiant phases. Finally, to treat quantum fluctuations in a quantitative fashion, we employ a generalized wormhole quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. We discuss how these three methods are used in a cooperative fashion. In the calculated phase diagrams we see several features arising from the long-range interactions: The devil's staircases of distinct magnetically ordered normal phases and non-trivial magnetically ordered superradiant phases beyond the findings for nearest-neighbor interactions. Examples are a superradiant phase with a three-sublattice magnetic order on the square lattice and the superradiant Wigner crystal with four sites per unit cell on the triangular lattice. We find the transition between normal and superradiant phases with the same (different) magnetic order to be of second order with Dicke universality (first order). Further, between superradiant phases we find first-order phase transitions, besides specially highlighted regimes for which we find indications for second-order behavior.
We consider a mixture of ultracold bosonic atoms on a one-dimensional lattice described by the XXZ-Bose-Hubbard model, where the tunneling of one species depends on the spin state of a second deeply trapped species. We show how the inclusion of antiferromagnetic interactions among the spin degrees of freedom generates a Devil's staircase of symmetry-protected topological phases for a wide parameter regime via a bosonic analog of the Peierls mechanism in electron-phonon systems. These topological Peierls insulators are examples of symmetry-breaking topological phases, where long-range order due to spontaneous symmetry breaking coexists with topological properties such as fractionalized edge states. Moreover, we identify a region of supersolid phases that do not require long-range interactions. They appear instead due to a Peierls incommensurability mechanism, where competing orders modify the underlying crystalline structure of Peierls insulators, becoming superfluid. Our work show the possibilities that ultracold atomic systems offer to investigate strongly-correlated topological phenomena beyond those found in natural materials.
There exists many quantum or topological phases in Nature. One well known organization principle is through various quantum or topological phases transitions between or among these phases. Another is through either complete or in-complete devil staircases in their quantized forms. Here, we show that both classes of organization principle appear in an experimentally accessible system: strongly interacting spinor bosons subject to any of the linear combinations of the Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in the space of the two SOC parameters $ ( α, β) $ in a square lattice. In the strong coupling limit, it leads to a new quantum spin model called Rotated Ferromagnetic Heisenberg model (RFHM). The RFHM leads to rich and unconventional magnetic phases even in a bipartite lattice. For the first class, by identifying a suitable low energy mode, we investigate a new quantum Lifshitz transition from the Y-x to the IC-SkX-y phase. For the second class, we introduce the topological rational and irrational winding numbers $ W $ to characterize the incomplete or complete devil staircases and also perform their quantizations. The IC-YZ-x/LQx phases form a Cantor set with a fractal dimension along the complete devil staircase. They also take most of measures in the incomplete devil staircases when $ β\ll α$. Quantum chaos and quantum information scramblings along the diagonal line $ α=β$ are discussed. Implications on un-conventional magnetic ordered phases detected in the 4d- or 5d-orbital strongly correlated materials with SOC and in the current or near future cold atom systems are presented.