Entanglement analysis of isotropic spin-1 chains

We investigate entanglement spectra of the SO(3) bilinear-biquadratic spin-1 chain, a model with phases exhibiting spontaneous symmetry breaking (both translation and spin rotation), points of enlarged symmetry, and a symmetry-protected topological phase (the Haldane phase). Our analysis reveals how these hallmark features are manifested in the entanglement spectra, and highlights the versatility of entanglement spectra as a tool to study one-dimensional quantum systems via small finite size realisations.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figure

Sign-problem-free Monte Carlo simulation of certain frustrated quantum magnets

We introduce a Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method which efficiently simulates in a sign-problem-free way a broad class of frustrated $S=1/2$ models with competing antiferromagnetic interactions. Our scheme uses the basis of total spin eigenstates of clusters of spins to avoid the severe sign problem faced by other QMC methods. We also flag important limitations of the new method, and comment on possibilities for further progress.Comment: 6 pages + appendix with supplemental informatio

Measurement Protocol for the Entanglement Spectrum of Cold Atoms

Entanglement, and, in particular the entanglement spectrum, plays a major role in characterizing many-body quantum systems. While there has been a surge of theoretical works on the subject, no experimental measurement has been performed to date because of the lack of an implementable measurement scheme. Here, we propose a measurement protocol to access the entanglement spectrum of many-body states in experiments with cold atoms in optical lattices. Our scheme effectively performs a Ramsey spectroscopy of the entanglement Hamiltonian and is based on the ability to produce several copies of the state under investigation together with the possibility to perform a global swap gate between two copies conditioned on the state of an auxiliary qubit. We show how the required conditional swap gate can be implemented with cold atoms, either by using Rydberg interactions or coupling the atoms to a cavity mode. We illustrate these ideas on a simple (extended) Bose-Hubbard model where such a measurement protocol reveals topological features of the Haldane phase

Permutation Symmetric Critical Phases in Disordered Non-Abelian Anyonic Chains

Topological phases supporting non-abelian anyonic excitations have been proposed as candidates for topological quantum computation. In this paper, we study disordered non-abelian anyonic chains based on the quantum groups $SU(2)_k$, a hierarchy that includes the $\nu=5/2$ FQH state and the proposed $\nu=12/5$ Fibonacci state, among others. We find that for odd $k$ these anyonic chains realize infinite randomness critical {\it phases} in the same universality class as the $S_k$ permutation symmetric multi-critical points of Damle and Huse (Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 277203 (2002)). Indeed, we show that the pertinent subspace of these anyonic chains actually sits inside the ${\mathbb Z}_k \subset S_k$ symmetric sector of the Damle-Huse model, and this ${\mathbb Z}_k$ symmetry stabilizes the phase.Comment: 13 page

Critical Ising modes in low-dimensional Kondo insulators

We present an Ising-like intermediate phase for one-dimensional Kondo insulator systems. Resulting from a spinon splitting, its low-energy excitations are critical Ising modes, whereas the triplet sector has a spectral gap. It should occur as long as the RKKY oscillation amplitude dominates over any direct exchange between localized spins. The chiral fixed point, however, becomes unstable in the far Infra-Red limit due to prevalent fluctuations among localized spins which induce gapless triplet excitations in the spectrum. Based on previous numerical results, we obtain a paramagnetic disordered state ruled by the correlation length of the single impurity Kondo model.Comment: 7 pages, RevTeX; last version: to be published in Physical Review