Universal Relations in Long-range Quantum Spin Chains
Abstract
Understanding the emergence of novel collective behaviors in strongly interacting systems lies at the heart of quantum many-body physics. Valuable insight comes from examining how few-body correlations manifest in many-body systems, embodying the ``from few to many'' philosophy. An intriguing example is the set of universal relations in ultracold atomic gases, which connect a wide range of observables to a single quantity known as the contact. In this Letter, we demonstrate that universal relations manifest in a distinct class of quantum many-body systems, long-range quantum spin chains, which belong to a completely new universality class. Using effective field theory and the operator product expansion, we establish connections between the asymptotic behavior of equal-time spin correlation functions, the dynamical structure factor, and the contact density. The theoretical predictions for equal-time correlators are explicitly verified through numerical simulations based on matrix product states. Our results could be readily tested in state-of-the-art trapped-ion systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.23135,
title = {Universal Relations in Long-range Quantum Spin Chains},
author = {Ning Sun and Lei Feng and Pengfei Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.23135},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
5 pages, 5 figures, + supplemental material