English

Studying Continuous Symmetry Breaking using Energy Level Spectroscopy

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2017-04-28 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Tower of States analysis is a powerful tool for investigating phase transitions in condensed matter systems. Spontaneous symmetry breaking implies a specific structure of the energy eigenvalues and their corresponding quantum numbers on finite systems. In these lecture notes we explain the group representation theory used to derive the spectral structure for several scenarios of symmetry breaking. We give numerous examples to compute quantum numbers of the degenerate groundstates, including translational symmetry breaking or spin rotational symmetry breaking in Heisenberg antiferromagnets. These results are then compared to actual numerical data from Exact Diagonalization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.08622,
  title  = {Studying Continuous Symmetry Breaking using Energy Level Spectroscopy},
  author = {Alexander Wietek and Michael Schuler and Andreas M. Läuchli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.08622},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

28 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:29:54.824Z