No Arabic abstract
Landaus spontaneous symmetry breaking theory is a fundamental theory that describes the collective behaviors in many-body systems. It was well known that for usual spontaneous symmetry breaking in Hermitian systems, the order-disorder phase transition with gap closing and spontaneous symmetry breaking occur at the same critical point. In this paper, we generalized the Landaus spontaneous symmetry breaking theory to the cases in non-Hermitian (NH) many-body systems with biorthogonal Z2 symmetry and tried to discover certain universal features. We were surprised to find that the effect of the NH terms splits the spontaneous biorthogonal Z2 symmetry breaking from a (biorthogonal) order-disorder phase transition with gap closing. The sudden change of similarity for two degenerate ground states indicates a new type of quantum phase transition without gap closing accompanied by spontaneous biorthogonal Z2 symmetry breaking. We will take the NH transverse Ising model as an example to investigate the anomalous spontaneous symmetry breaking. The numerical results were consistent with the theoretical predictions.
We develop the perturbation theory of the fidelity susceptibility in biorthogonal bases for arbitrary interacting non-Hermitian many-body systems with real eigenvalues. The quantum criticality in the non-Hermitian transverse field Ising chain is investigated by the second derivative of ground-state energy and the ground-state fidelity susceptibility. We show that the system undergoes a second-order phase transition with the Ising universal class by numerically computing the critical points and the critical exponents from the finite-size scaling theory. Interestingly, our results indicate that the biorthogonal quantum phase transitions are described by the biorthogonal fidelity susceptibility instead of the conventional fidelity susceptibility.
We study the effects of the position of the passive and active cavities on the spontaneous parity-time (PT) symmetry breaking behavior in non-Hermitian coupled cavities array model. We analyze and discuss the energy eigenvalue spectrums and PT symmetry in the topologically trivial and nontrivial regimes under three different cases in detail, i.e., the passive and active cavities are located at, respectively, the two end positions, the second and penultimate positions, and each position in coupled cavities array. The odevity of the number of cavities is further considered to check the effects of the non-Hermitian terms applied on the PT symmetric and asymmetric systems. We find that the position of the passive and active cavities has remarkable impacts on the spontaneous PT symmetry breaking behavior, and in each case the system exhibits distinguishable and novel spontaneous PT symmetry breaking characteristic, respectively. The effects of the non-Hermitian terms on the $mathcal{PT}$ symmetric and asymmetric systems due to the odevity are comparatively different in the first case while qualitatively same in the second case.
CeAlGe, a proposed type-II Weyl semimetal, orders antiferromagnetically below 5 K. Both a spin-flop and a spin-flip transitions to less than 1 $mu_B$/Ce are observed at 2 K below 30 kOe in the $M(H)$ ($bf{H}|bf{a}$ and $bf{b}$) and 4.3 kOe ($bf{H}|langle110rangle$) data, respectively, indicating a four-fold symmetry of the $M(H)$ along the principal directions in the tetragonal $it{ab}$-plane with $langle110rangle$ set of easy directions. However, anomalously robust and complex two-fold symmetry is observed in the angular dependence of resistivity and magnetic torque data in the magnetically ordered state once the field is swept in the $it{ab}$-plane. This two-fold symmetry is independent of temperature- and field-hystereses and suggests a magnetic phase transition that separates two different magnetic structures in the $it{ab}$-plane. The boundary of this magnetic phase transition can be tuned by different growth conditions.
We show that the spontaneous symmetry breaking can be defined also for finite systems based on the properly defined jump probability between the ground states in the 2d and 3d Ising models on a square and a cubic lattice respectively. Our analysis reveals the existence of an interval in the temperature (control parameter) space within which the spontaneous symmetry breaking takes place. The upper limit of this region is the pseudocritical point where the symmetric vacuum bifurcates in energetically degenerate non-symmetric vacua, initiating the spontaneous symmetry breaking process. The lower limit, identified as the temperature value at which the spontaneous symmetry breaking is completed, is characterized by maximal characteristic time for the decay of magnetization (order parameter) auto-correlations. We argue that this anomalous enhancement of auto-correlations is attributed to the transition from type I to on-off intermittency in the order parameter dynamics. Possible phenomenological implications of this behaviour are briefly discussed.
We show that Jastrow-Slater wave functions, in which a density-density Jastrow factor is applied onto an uncorrelated fermionic state, may possess long-range order even when all symmetries are preserved in the wave function. This fact is mainly related to the presence of a sufficiently strong Jastrow term (also including the case of full Gutzwiller projection, suitable for describing spin models). Selected examples are reported, including the spawning of Neel order and dimerization in spin systems, and the stabilization of charge and orbital order in itinerant electronic systems.