No Arabic abstract
Results are presented for the dynamics of an almost strong edge mode which is the quasi-stable Majorana edge mode occurring in non-integrable spin chains. The dynamics of the edge mode is studied using exact diagonalization, and compared with time-evolution with respect to an effective semi-infinite model in Krylov space obtained from the recursion method. The effective Krylov Hamiltonian is found to resemble a spatially inhomogeneous SSH model where the hopping amplitude increases linearly with distance into the bulk, typical of thermalizing systems, but also has a staggered or dimerized structure superimposed on it. The non-perturbatively long lifetime of the edge mode is shown to be due to this staggered structure which diminishes the effectiveness of the linearly growing hopping amplitude. On taking the continuum limit of the Krylov Hamiltonian, the edge mode is found to be equivalent to the quasi-stable mode of a Dirac Hamiltonian on a half line, with a mass which is non-zero over a finite distance, before terminating into a gapless metallic bulk. The analytic estimates are found to be in good agreement with the numerically obtained lifetimes of the edge mode.
Integrable Floquet spin chains are known to host strong zero and $pi$ modes which are boundary operators that respectively commute and anticommute with the Floquet unitary generating stroboscopic time-evolution, in addition to anticommuting with a discrete symmetry of the Floquet unitary. Thus the existence of strong modes imply a characteristic pairing structure of the full spectrum. Weak interactions modify the strong modes to almost strong modes that almost commute or anticommute with the Floquet unitary. Manifestations of strong and almost strong modes are presented in two different Krylov subspaces. One is a Krylov subspace obtained from a Lanczos iteration that maps the Heisenberg time-evolution generated by the Floquet Hamiltonian onto dynamics of a single particle on a fictitious chain with nearest neighbor hopping. The second is a Krylov subspace obtained from the Arnoldi iteration that maps the Heisenberg time-evolution generated directly by the Floquet unitary onto dynamics of a single particle on a fictitious chain with longer range hopping. While the former Krylov subspace is sensitive to the branch of the logarithm of the Floquet unitary, the latter obtained from the Arnoldi scheme is not. The effective single particle models obtained in the two Krylov subspaces are discussed, and the topological properties of the Krylov chain that ensure stable $0$ and $pi$ modes at the boundaries are highlighted. The role of interactions is discussed. Expressions for the lifetime of the almost strong modes are derived in terms of the parameters of the Krylov subspace, and are compared with exact diagonalization.
We study the topological edge plasmon modes between two diatomic chains of identical plasmonic nanoparticles. Zak phase for longitudinal plasmon modes in each chain is calculated analytically by solutions of macroscopic Maxwells equations for particles in quasi-static dipole approximation. This approximation provides a direct analogy with the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model such that the eigenvalue is mapped to the frequency dependent inverse-polarizability of the nanoparticles. The edge state frequency is found to be the same as the single-particle resonance frequency, which is insensitive to the separation distances within a unit cell. Finally, full electrodynamic simulations with realistic parameters suggest that the edge plasmon mode can be realized through near-field optical spectroscopy.
The low-energy magnetic excitation from the highly Ca-doped quasi-one-dimensional magnet SrCa13Cu24O41 was studied in the magnetic ordered state by using inelastic neutron scattering. We observed the gapless spin-wave excitation, dispersive along the a and c axes but nondispersive along the b axis. Such excitations are attributed to the spin wave from the spin-chain sublattice. Model fitting to the experimental data gives the nearest-neighbour interaction Jc as 5.4 meV and the interchain interaction Ja = 4.4 meV. Jc is antiferromagnetic and its value is close to the nearest-neighbour interactions of the similar edge-sharing spin-chain systems such as CuGeO3. Comparing with the hole-doped spin chains in Sr14Cu24O41, which shows a spin gap due to spin dimers formed around Zhang-Rice singlets, the chains in SrCa13Cu24O41 show a gapless excitation in this study. We ascribe such a change from gapped to gapless excitations to holes transferring away from the chain sublattice into the ladder sublattice upon Ca doping.
Fractionalization is a phenomenon in which strong interactions in a quantum system drive the emergence of excitations with quantum numbers that are absent in the building blocks. Outstanding examples are excitations with charge e/3 in the fractional quantum Hall effect, solitons in one-dimensional conducting polymers and Majorana states in topological superconductors. Fractionalization is also predicted to manifest itself in low-dimensional quantum magnets, such as one-dimensional antiferromagnetic S = 1 chains. The fundamental features of this system are gapped excitations in the bulk and, remarkably, S = 1/2 edge states at the chain termini, leading to a four-fold degenerate ground state that reflects the underlying symmetry-protected topological order. Here, we use on-surface synthesis to fabricate one-dimensional spin chains that contain the S = 1 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon triangulene as the building block. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy at 4.5 K, we probe length-dependent magnetic excitations at the atomic scale in both open-ended and cyclic spin chains, and directly observe gapped spin excitations and fractional edge states therein. Exact diagonalization calculations provide conclusive evidence that the spin chains are described by the S = 1 bilinear-biquadratic Hamiltonian in the Haldane symmetry-protected topological phase. Our results open a bottom-up approach to study strongly correlated quantum spin liquid phases in purely organic materials, with the potential for the realization of measurement-based quantum computation.
Certain periodically driven quantum many-particle systems in one dimension are known to exhibit edge modes that are related to topological properties and lead to approximate degeneracies of the Floquet spectrum. A similar situation occurs in spin chains, where stable edge modes were shown to exist at all energies in certain integrable spin chains. Moreover, these edge modes were found to be remarkably stable to perturbations. Here we investigate the stability of edge modes in interacting, periodically driven, clean systems. We introduce a model that features edge modes that persist over times scales well in excess of the time needed for the bulk of the system to heat to infinite temperatures.