English

Eigenstate phases with finite on-site non-Abelian symmetry

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2017-10-25 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study the eigenstate phases of disordered spin chains with on-site finite non-Abelian symmetry. We develop a general formalism based on standard group theory to construct local spin Hamiltonians invariant under any on-site symmetry. We then specialize to the case of the simplest non-Abelian group, S3S_3, and numerically study a particular two parameter spin-1 Hamiltonian. We observe a thermal phase and a many-body localized phase with a spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) from S3S_3 to Z3\mathbb{Z}_3 in our model Hamiltonian. We diagnose these phases using full entanglement distributions and level statistics. We also use a spin-glass diagnostic specialized to detect spontaneous breaking of the S3S_3 symmetry down to Z3\mathbb{Z}_3. Our observed phases are consistent with the possibilities outlined by Potter and Vasseur [Phys. Rev. B 94, 224206 (2016)], namely thermal/ ergodic and spin-glass many-body localized (MBL) phases. We also speculate about the nature of an intermediate region between the thermal and MBL+SSB regions where full S3S_3 symmetry exists.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.06062,
  title  = {Eigenstate phases with finite on-site non-Abelian symmetry},
  author = {Abhishodh Prakash and Sriram Ganeshan and Lukasz Fidkowski and Tzu-Chieh Wei},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06062},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

16 pages, 10 figures, included subsection on finite size scaling collapse, added additional comments on the spin-glass diagnostic, updated plots, conclusions unchanged