Quantum discord and quantum phase transition in spin chains

Quantum phase transitions of the transverse Ising and antiferromagnetic XXZ spin S=1/2 chains are studied using quantum discord. Quantum discord allows the measure of quantum correlations present in many-body quantum systems. It is shown that the amount of quantum correlations increases close to the critical points. The observations are in agreement with the information provided by the concurrence which measures the entanglement of the many-body system.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Magnetic properties of antiferromagnetic quantum Heisenberg spin systems with a strict single particle site occupation

We work out the magnetization and susceptibility of Heisenberg- and XXZ-model antiferromagnet spin-1/2 systems in $D$ dimensions under a rigorous constraint of single particle site occupancy. Quantum fluctuations are taken into account up to the first order in a loop expansion beyond the N\'eel state mean field solution. We discuss the results, their validity in the vicinity of the critical point and compare them with the results obtained by means of a spin wave approach.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Effects of a strict site-occupation constraint in the description of quantum spin systems at finite temperature

We study quantum spin systems described by Heisenberg-like models at finite temperature with a strict site-occupation constraint imposed by a procedure originally proposed by V. N. Popov and S. A. Fedotov \cite{Popov-88}. We show that the strict site-occupation constraint modifies quantitatively the behaviour of physical quantities when compared to the case for which this constraint is fixed in the average by means of a Lagrange multiplier method. The relevance of the N\'eel state with the strict site-occupation contraint of the spin lattice is studied. With an exact site-occupation the transition temperature of the antiferromagnetic N\'eel and spin liquid order parameters are twice as large as the critical temperature one gets with an average Lagrange multiplier method. We consider also a mapping of the low-energy spin Hamiltonian into a $QED_3$ Lagrangian of spinons. In this framework we compare the dynamically generated mass to the one obtained by means of an average site-occupation constraint.Comment: PhD Thesis, 137 pages, 18 figure

Kekule-distortion-induced Exciton instability in graphene

Effects of a Kekule distortion on exciton instability in single-layer graphene are discussed. In the framework of quantum electrodynamics the mass of the electron generated dynamically is worked out using a Schwinger-Dyson equation. For homogeneous lattice distortion it is shown that the generated mass is independent of the amplitude of the lattice distortion at the one-loop approximation. Formation of excitons induced by the homogeneous Kekule distortion could appear only through direct dependence of the lattice distortion.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Vector chiral states in low-dimensional quantum spin systems

A class of exact spin ground states with nonzero averages of vector spin chirality, $$, is presented. It is obtained by applying non-uniform O(2) rotations of spin operators in the XY plane on the SU(2)-invariant Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) states and their parent Hamiltonians. Excitation energies of the new ground states are studied with the use of single-mode approximation in one dimension for S=1. The excitation gap remains robust. Construction of chiral AKLT states is shown to be possible in higher dimensions. We also present a general idea to produce vector chirality-condensed ground states as non-uniform O(2) rotations of the non-chiral parent states. Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction is shown to imply non-zero spin chirality.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Memory erasure in small systems

We consider an overdamped nanoparticle in a driven double-well potential as a generic model of an erasable one-bit memory. We study in detail the statistics of the heat dissipated during an erasure process and show that full erasure may be achieved by dissipating less heat than the Landauer bound. We quantify the occurrence of such events and propose a single-particle experiment to verify our predictions. Our results show that Landauer's principle has to be generalized at the nanoscale to accommodate heat fluctuations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Site occupation constraints in mean-field approaches of quantum spin systems at finite temperature

We study the effect of site occupation on the description of quantum spin systems at finite temperature and mean-field level. We impose each lattice site to be occupied by a single electron. This is realized by means of a specific prescription. The outcome of the prescription is compared to the result obtained by means of a projection procedure which fixes the site occupation to one particle per site on an average. The comparison is performed for different representations of the Hamiltonian in Fock space leading to different types of mean-field solutions. The behaviour of order parameters is analyzed for each choice of the mean-field and constraint which fixes the occupation rate at each site. Sizable quantitative differences between the outcomes obtained with the two different constraints are observed.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure