No Arabic abstract
Frustration in quantum many body systems is quantified by the degree of incompatibility between the local and global orders associated, respectively, to the ground states of the local interaction terms and the global ground state of the total many-body Hamiltonian. This universal measure is bounded from below by the ground-state bipartite block entanglement. For many-body Hamiltonians that are sums of two-body interaction terms, a further inequality relates quantum frustration to the pairwise entanglement between the constituents of the local interaction terms. This additional bound is a consequence of the limits imposed by monogamy on entanglement shareability. We investigate the behavior of local pair frustration in quantum spin models with competing interactions on different length scales and show that valence bond solids associated to exact ground-state dimerization correspond to a transition from generic frustration, i.e. geometric, common to classical and quantum systems alike, to genuine quantum frustration, i.e. solely due to the non-commutativity of the different local interaction terms. We discuss how such frustration transitions separating genuinely quantum orders from classical-like ones are detected by observable quantities such as the static structure factor and the interferometric visibility.
We introduce a general analytic approach to the study of factorization points and factorized ground states in quantum cooperative systems. The method allows to determine rigorously existence, location, and exact form of separable ground states in a large variety of, generally non-exactly solvable, spin models belonging to different universality classes. The theory applies to translationally invariant systems, irrespective of spatial dimensionality, and for spin-spin interactions of arbitrary range.
At the core of every frustrated system, one can identify the existence of frustrated rings that are usually interpreted in terms of single--particle physics. We check this point of view through a careful analysis of the entanglement entropy of both models that admit an exact single--particle decomposition of their Hilbert space due to integrability and those for which the latter is supposed to hold only as a low energy approximation. In particular, we study generic spin chains made by an odd number of sites with short-range antiferromagnetic interactions and periodic boundary conditions, thus characterized by a weak, i.e. nonextensive, frustration. While for distances of the order of the correlation length the phenomenology of these chains is similar to that of the non-frustrated cases, we find that correlation functions involving a number of sites scaling like the system size follow different rules. We quantify the long-range correlations through the von Neumann entanglement entropy, finding that indeed it violates the area law, while not diverging with the system size. This behavior is well fitted by a universal law that we derive from the conjectured single--particle picture.
We study the quantum melting of stripe phases in models with competing short range and long range interactions decaying with distance as $1/r^{sigma}$ in two space dimensions. At zero temperature we find a two step disordering of the stripe phases with the growth of quantum fluctuations. A quantum critical point separating a phase with long range positional order from a phase with long range orientational order is found when $sigma leq 4/3$, which includes the Coulomb interaction case $sigma=1$. For $sigma > 4/3$ the transition is first order, which includes the dipolar case $sigma=3$. Another quantum critical point separates the orientationally ordered (nematic) phase from a quantum disordered phase for any value of $sigma$. Critical exponents as a function of $sigma$ are computed at one loop order in an $epsilon$ expansion and, whenever available, compared with known results. For finite temperatures it is found that for $sigma geq 2$ orientational order decays algebraically with distance until a critical Kosterlitz-Thouless line. Nevertheless, for $sigma < 2$ it is found that long range orientational order can exist at finite temperatures until a critical line which terminates at the quantum critical point at $T=0$. The temperature dependence of the critical line near the quantum critical point is determined as a function of $sigma$.
We study the time evolution of the logarithmic negativity after a global quantum quench. In a 1+1 dimensional conformal invariant field theory, we consider the negativity between two intervals which can be either adjacent or disjoint. We show that the negativity follows the quasi-particle interpretation for the spreading of entanglement. We check and generalise our findings with a systematic analysis of the negativity after a quantum quench in the harmonic chain, highlighting two peculiar lattice effects: the late birth and the sudden death of entanglement.
We study the Killing vectors of the quantum ground-state manifold of a parameter-dependent Hamiltonian. We find that the manifold may have symmetries that are not visible at the level of the Hamiltonian and that different quantum phases of matter exhibit different symmetries. We propose a Bianchi-based classification of the various ground-state manifolds using the Lie algebra of the Killing vector fields. Moreover, we explain how to exploit these symmetries to find geodesics and explore their behaviour when crossing critical lines. We briefly discuss the relation between geodesics, energy fluctuations and adiabatic preparation protocols. Our primary example is the anisotropic transverse-field Ising model. We also analyze the Ising limit and find analytic solutions to the geodesic equations for both cases.