We study the interplay between the Kitaev and Ising interactions on both ladder and two dimensional lattices. We show that the ground state of the Kitaev ladder is a symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase, which is protected by a $mathbb{Z}_2 tim
es mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry. It is confirmed by the degeneracy of the entanglement spectrum and non-trivial phase factors (inequivalent projective representations of the symmetries), which are obtained within infinite matrix-product representation of numerical density matrix renormalization group. We derive the effective theory to describe the topological phase transition on both ladder and two-dimensional lattices, which is given by the transverse field Ising model with/without next-nearest neighbor coupling. The ladder has three phases, namely, the Kitaev SPT, symmetry broken ferro/antiferromagnetic order and classical spin-liquid. The non-zero quantum critical point and its corresponding central charge are provided by the effective theory, which are in full agreement with the numerical results, i.e., the divergence of entanglement entropy at the critical point, change of the entanglement spectrum degeneracy and a drop in the ground-state fidelity. The central charge of the critical points are either c=1 or c=2, with the magnetization and correlation exponents being 1/4 and 1/2, respectively. In the absence of frustration, the 2D lattice shows a topological phase transition from the $mathbb{Z}_2$ spin-liquid state to the long-range ordered Ising phase at finite ratio of couplings, while in the presence of frustration, an order-by-disorder transition is induced by the Kitaev term. The 2D classical spin-liquid phase is unstable against the addition of Kitaev term toward an ordered phase before the transition to the $mathbb{Z}_2$ spin-liquid state.
We study the effect of quantum fluctuations by means of a transverse magnetic field ($Gamma$) on the antiferromagnetic $J_1-J_2$ Ising model on the checkerboard lattice, the two dimensional version of the pyrochlore lattice. The zero-temperature phas
e diagram of the model has been obtained by employing a plaquette operator approach (POA). The plaquette operator formalism bosonizes the model, in which a single boson is associated to each eigenstate of a plaquette and the inter-plaquette interactions define an effective Hamiltonian. The excitations of a plaquette would represent an-harmonic fluctuations of the model, which lead not only to lower the excitation energy compared with a single-spin flip but also to lift the extensive degeneracy in favor of a plaquette ordered solid (RPS) state, which breaks lattice translational symmetry, in addition to a unique collinear phase for $J_2>J_1$. The bosonic excitation gap vanishes at the critical points to the N{e}el ($J_2 < J_1$) and collinear ($J_2 > J_1$) ordered phases, which defines the critical phase boundaries. At the homogeneous coupling ($J_2=J_1$) and its close neighborhood, the (canted) RPS state, established from an-harmonic fluctuations, lasts for low fields, $Gamma/J_1lesssim 0.3$, which is followed by a transition to the quantum paramagnet (polarized) phase at high fields. The transition from RPS state to the N{e}el phase is either a deconfined quantum phase transition or a first order one, however a continuous transition occurs between RPS and collinear phases.
We study the phase diagram of the anisotropic spin-1 Heisenberg chain with single ion anisotropy (D) using a ground-state fidelity approach. The ground-state fidelity and its corresponding susceptibility are calculated within the quantum renormalizat
ion group scheme where we obtained the renormalization of fidelity preventing to calculate the ground state. Using this approach, the phase boundaries between the antiferromagnetic N{e}el, Haldane and large-D phases are obtained for the whole phase diagram, which justifies the application of quantum renormalization group to trace the symmetery protected topological phases. In addition, we present numerical exact diagonalization (Lanczos) results in, which we employ a recently introduced non-local order parameter to locate the transition from Haldane to large-D phase accurately.
We present the zero temperature phase diagram of the bond alternating Ising chain in the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. An abrupt change in ground state fidelity is a signature of quantum phase transition. We obtain the renormalizatio
n of fidelity in terms of quantum renormalization group without the need to know the ground state. We calculate the fidelity susceptibility and its scaling behavior close to quantum critical point (QCP) to find the critical exponent which governs the divergence of correlation length. The model consists of a long range antiferromagnetic order with nonzero staggered magnetization which is separated from a helical ordered phase at QCP. Our results state that the critical exponent is independent of the bond alternation parameter (lambda) while the maximum attainable helical order depends on lambda.
The Kondo-necklace model can describe magnetic low-energy limit of strongly correlated heavy fermion materials. There exist multiple energy scales in this model corresponding to each phase of the system. Here, we study quantum phase transition betwee
n the Kondo-singlet phase and the antiferromagnetic long-range ordered phase, and show the effect of anisotropies in terms of quantum information properties and vanishing energy gap. We employ the perturbative continuous unitary transformations approach to calculate the energy gap and spin-spin correlations for the model in the thermodynamic limit of one, two, and three spatial dimensions as well as for spin ladders. In particular, we show that the method, although being perturbative, can predict the expected quantum critical point, where the gap of low-energy spectrum vanishes, which is in good agreement with results of other numerical and Greens function analyses. In addition, we employ concurrence, a bipartite entanglement measure, to study the criticality of the model. Absence of singularities in the derivative of concurrence in two and three dimensions in the Kondo-necklace model shows that this model features multipartite entanglement. We also discuss crossover from the one-dimensional to the two-dimensional model via the ladder structure.
We have investigated the zero and finite temperature behaviors of the anisotropic antiferromagnetic Heisenberg XXZ spin-1/2 chain in the presence of a transverse magnetic field (h). The attention is concentrated on an interval of magnetic field betwe
en the factorizing field (h_f) and the critical one (h_c). The model presents a spin-flop phase for 0<h<h_f with an energy scale which is defined by the long range antiferromagnetic order while it undergoes an entanglement phase transition at h=h_f. The entanglement estimators clearly show that the entanglement is lost exactly at h=h_f which justifies different quantum correlations on both sides of the factorizing field. As a consequence of zero entanglement (at h=h_f) the ground state is known exactly as a product of single particle states which is the starting point for initiating a spin wave theory. The linear spin wave theory is implemented to obtain the specific heat and thermal entanglement of the model in the interested region. A double peak structure is found in the specific heat around h=h_f which manifests the existence of two energy scales in the system as a result of two competing orders before the critical point. These results are confirmed by the low temperature Lanczos data which we have computed.
We have numerically studied the thermodynamic properties of the spin 1/2 XXZ chain in the presence of a transverse (non commuting) magnetic field. The thermal, field dependence of specific heat and correlation functions for chains up to 20 sites have
been calculated. The area where the specific heat decays exponentially is considered as a measure of the energy gap. We have also obtained the exchange interaction between chains in a bulk material using the random phase approximation and derived the phase diagram of the three dimensional material with this approximation. The behavior of the structure factor at different momenta verifies the antiferromagnetic long range order in y-direction for the three dimensional case. Moreover, we have concluded that the Low Temperature Lanczos results [M. Aichhorn et al., Phys. Rev. B 67, 161103(R) (2003)] are more accurate for low temperatures and closer to the full diagonalization ones than the results of Finite Temperature Lanczos Method [J. Jaklic and P. Prelovsek, Phys. Rev. B 49, 5065 (1994)].
