Density matrix renormalization group simulations of SU(N) Heisenberg chains using standard Young tableaus: Fundamental representation and comparison with a finite-size Bethe ansatz

We develop an efficient method to perform density matrix renormalization group simulations of the SU(N) Heisenberg chain with open boundary conditions taking full advantage of the SU(N) symmetry of the problem. This method is an extension of the method previously developed for exact diagonalizations and relies on a systematic use of the basis of standard Young tableaux. Concentrating on the model with the fundamental representation at each site (i.e., one particle per site in the fermionic formulation), we have benchmarked our results for the ground-state energy up to N = 8 and up to 420 sites by comparing them with Bethe ansatz results on open chains, for which we have derived and solved the Bethe ansatz equations. The agreement for the ground-state energy is excellent for SU(3) (12 digits). It decreases with N, but it is still satisfactory for N = 8 (six digits). Central charges c are also extracted from the entanglement entropy using the Calabrese-Cardy formula and agree with the theoretical values expected from the SU(N)(1) Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theories.

Dimerization and exotic criticality in spin-S chains

Natalia Chepiga

In this thesis we have studied the emergence of spontaneously dimerized phases in frustrated spin-S chains, with emphasis on the nature of the critical lines between the dimerized and non-dimerized phases. The main numerical method used in this thesis is the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG). The DMRG algorithm is a relatively old and well established method for the investigation of the ground-state. In this thesis, we show how to use this algorithm to calculate the excitation spectra of one-dimensional critical systems, known in the context of conformal field theory as conformal towers of states. We have demonstrated that the method works very well for two simple minimal models (the transverse-field Ising model and the three-state Potts model), and we have used it systematically to identify the universality classes and the underlying conformal field theories of various one-dimensional spin systems. It has been known for a long time that the transition to a spontaneously dimerized phase in a spin-1 chain can be either continuous, in the Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) SU(2) level 2 universality class, or first order. By combining a careful numerical investigation with a conformal field theory analysis, we were able to detect in a frustrated spin-1 chain with competing next-nearest-neighbor and three-site interactions the presence of yet another type of continuous phase transition that belongs to the Ising universality class. In contrast to the WZW SU(2) level 2 critical line, at which the singlet-triplet gap closes, the Ising transition occurs entirely in the singlet sector, while the singlet-triplet gap remains open. The use of the standard DMRG approach, along the lines mentioned above, has allowed us to provide explicit numerical evidence for the presence of a conformal tower of singlets inside the spin gap. Moreover, according to field theory, a WZW SU(2) level k critical line can turn into a first order transition due to the presence of a marginal operator in the WZW SU(2) level k model. A careful investigation of the conformal towers along the critical lines has allowed us to find the precise location of this point in both S=1 and S=3/2 chains. We have also shown that the nature of the continuous dimerization transitions is related to the topological properties of the corresponding phases, and that the phase diagrams of various frustrated spin chains can be effectively extracted by looking at the local topological order parameter - the degeneracy of the lowest state in the entanglement spectrum. When coupled with the conformal field theory of open systems, DMRG appears to be an extremely powerful tool to characterize not only the phase diagram and the ground-state correlations of quantum one-dimensional systems, but also the excitation spectrum and the conformal structure along critical lines.

EPFL2017

Spontaneous dimerization, critical lines, and short-range correlations in a frustrated spin-1 chain

Natalia Chepiga, Frédéric Mila

We report on a detailed investigation of the spin-1 J1−J2−J3 Heisenberg model, a frustrated model with nearest-neighbor coupling J1, next-nearest neighbor coupling J2, and a three-site interaction J3[(Si−1⋅Si)(Si⋅Si+1)+H.c.] previously studied in [Phys. Rev. B 93, 241108(R) (2016)]. Using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and exact diagonalizations, we show that the phase boundaries between the Haldane phase, the next-nearest neighbor Haldane phase, and the dimerized phase can be very accurately determined by combining the information deduced from the dimerization, the ground-state energy, the entanglement spectrum and the Berry phase. By a careful investigation of the finite-size spectrum, we also show that the transition between the next-nearest neighbor Haldane phase and the dimerized phase is in the Ising universality class all along the critical line. Furthermore, we justify the conformal embedding of the SU(2)2 Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theory in terms of a boson and an Ising field, and we explicitly derive a number of consequences of this embedding for the spectrum along the SU(2)2 transition line between the Haldane phase and the dimerized phase. We also show that the solitons along the first-order transition line between the Haldane phase and the dimerized phase carry a spin-1/2, while the domain walls between different dimerization domains inside the dimerized phase carry a spin 1. Finally, we show that short-range correlations change character in the Haldane and dimerized phases through disorder and Lifshitz lines, as well as through the development of short-range dimer correlations in the Haldane phase, leading to a remarkably rich phase diagram.

2016

Exact diagonalization of HeisenbergSU(N)chains in the fully symmetric and antisymmetric representations

Frédéric Mila, Pierre Marcel Nataf

Motivated by recent experimental progress in the context of ultracold multicolor fermionic atoms in optical lattices, we have developed a method to exactly diagonalize the Heisenberg SU(N) Hamiltonian with several particles per site living in a fully symmetric or antisymmetric representation of SU(N). The method, based on the use of standard Young tableaux, takes advantage of the full SU(N) symmetry, allowing one to work directly in each irreducible representation of the global SU(N) group. Since the SU(N) singlet sector is often much smaller than the full Hilbert space, this enables one to reach much larger system sizes than with conventional exact diagonalizations. The method is applied to the study of Heisenberg chains in the symmetric representation with two and three particles per site up to N=10 and up to 20 sites. For the length scales accessible to this approach, all systems except the Haldane chain [SU(2) with two particles per site] appear to be gapless, and the central charge and scaling dimensions extracted from the results are consistent with a critical behavior in the SU(N) level k Wess-Zumino-Witten universality class, where k is the number of particles per site. These results point to the existence of a crossover between this universality class and the asymptotic low-energy behavior with a gapped spectrum or a critical behavior in the SU(N) level 1 WZW universality class.

2016

Dimerization and exotic criticality in spin-S chains

Natalia Chepiga

EPFL2017