No Arabic abstract
Topological orders and associated topological protected excitations satisfying non-Abelian statistics have been widely explored in various platforms. The $mathbb{Z}_3$ parafermions are regarded as the most natural generation of the Majorana fermions to realize these topological orders. Here we investigate the topological phase and emergent $mathbb{Z}_2$ spin phases in an extended parafermion chain. This model exhibits rich variety of phases, including not only topological ferromagnetic phase, which supports non-Abelian anyon excitation, but also spin-fluid, dimer and chiral phases from the emergent $mathbb{Z}_2$ spin model. We generalize the measurement tools in $mathbb{Z}_2$ spin models to fully characterize these phases in the extended parafermion model and map out the corresponding phase diagram. Surprisingly, we find that all the phase boundaries finally merge to a single supercritical point. In regarding of the rather generality of emergent phenomena in parafermion models, this approach opens a wide range of intriguing applications in investigating the exotic phases in other parafermion models.
The Haldane phase represents one of the most important symmetry protected states in modern physics. This state can be realized using spin-1 and spin-${1over 2}$ Heisenberg models and bosonic particles. Here we explore the emergent Haldane phase in an alternating bond $mathbb{Z}_3$ parafermion chain, which is different from the previous proposals from fundamental statistics and symmetries. We show that this emergent phase can also be characterized by a modified long-range string order, as well as four-fold degeneracy in the ground state energies and entanglement spectra. This phase is protected by both the charge conjugate and parity symmetry, and the edge modes are shown to satisfy parafermionic statistics, in which braiding of the two edge modes yields a ${2pi over 3}$ phase. This model also supports rich phases, including topological ferromagnetic parafermion (FP) phase, trivial paramagnetic parafermion phase, classical dimer phase and gapless phase. The boundaries of the FP phase are shown to be gapless and critical with central charge $c = 4/5$. Even in the topological FP phase, it is also characterized by the long-range string order, thus we observe a drop of string order across the phase boundary between the FP phase and Haldane phase. These phenomena are quite general and this work opens a new way for finding exotic topological phases in $mathbb{Z}_k$ parafermion models.
We continue recent efforts to discover examples of deconfined quantum criticality in one-dimensional models. In this work we investigate the transition between a $mathbb{Z}_3$ ferromagnet and a phase with valence bond solid (VBS) order in a spin chain with $mathbb{Z}_3timesmathbb{Z}_3$ global symmetry. We study a model with alternating projective representations on the sites of the two sublattices, allowing the Hamiltonian to connect to an exactly solvable point having VBS order with the character of SU(3)-invariant singlets. Such a model does not admit a Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem typical of systems realizing deconfined critical points. Nevertheless, we find evidence for a direct transition from the VBS phase to a $mathbb{Z}_3$ ferromagnet. Finite-entanglement scaling data are consistent with a second-order or weakly first-order transition. We find in our parameter space an integrable lattice model apparently describing the phase transition, with a very long, finite, correlation length of 190878 lattice spacings. Based on exact results for this model, we propose that the transition is extremely weakly first order, and is part of a family of DQCP described by walking of renormalization group flows.
Studies of free particles in low-dimensional quantum systems such as two-leg ladders provide insight into the influence of statistics on collective behaviour. The behaviours of bosons and fermions are well understood, but two-dimensional systems also admit excitations with alternative statistics known as anyons. Numerical analysis of hard-core $mathbb{Z}_3$ anyons on the ladder reveals qualitatively distinct behaviour, including a novel phase transition associated with crystallisation of hole degrees of freedom into a periodic foam. Qualitative predictions are extrapolated for all Abelian $mathbb{Z}_q$ anyon models.
We propose the $mathbb{Z}_Q$ Berry phase as a topological invariant for higher-order symmetry-protected topological (HOSPT) phases for two- and three-dimensional systems. It is topologically stable for electron-electron interactions assuming the gap remains open. As a concrete example, we show that the Berry phase is quantized in $mathbb{Z}_4$ and characterizes the HOSPT phase of the extended Benalcazar-Bernevig-Hughes (BBH) model, which contains the next-nearest neighbor hopping and the intersite Coulomb interactions. In addition, we introduce the $mathbb{Z}_4$ Berry phase for the spin-model-analog of the BBH model, whose topological invariant has not been found so far. Furthermore, we demonstrate the Berry phase is quantized in $mathbb{Z}_4$ for the three-dimensional version of the BBH model. We also confirm the bulk-corner correspondence between the $mathbb{Z}_4$ Berry phase and the corner states in the HOSPT phases.
Recent experiments on a one-dimensional chain of trapped alkali atoms [arXiv:1707.04344] have observed a quantum transition associated with the onset of period-3 ordering of pumped Rydberg states. This spontaneous $mathbb{Z}_3$ symmetry breaking is described by a constrained model of hard-core bosons proposed by Fendley $et, ,al.$ [arXiv:cond-mat/0309438]. By symmetry arguments, the transition is expected to be in the universality class of the $mathbb{Z}_3$ chiral clock model with parameters preserving both time-reversal and spatial-inversion symmetries. We study the nature of the order-disorder transition in these models, and numerically calculate its critical exponents with exact diagonalization and density-matrix renormalization group techniques. We use finite-size scaling to determine the dynamical critical exponent $z$ and the correlation length exponent $ u$. Our analysis presents the only known instance of a strongly-coupled transition between gapped states with $z e 1$, implying an underlying nonconformal critical field theory.