Dimensional tuning of electronic states under strong and frustrated interactions

We study a model of strongly interacting spinless fermions on an anisotropic triangular lattice. At half-filling and the limit of strong repulsive nearest-neighbor interactions, the fermions align in stripes and form an insulating state. When a particle is doped, it either follows a one-dimensional free motion along the stripes or fractionalizes perpendicular to the stripes. The two propagations yield a dimensional tuning of the electronic state. We study the stability of this phase and derive an effective model to describe the low-energy excitations. Spectral functions are presented which can be used to experimentally detect signatures of the charge excitations.Comment: 4pages 4figures included. to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 10

Kinetic ferromagnetism on a kagome lattice

We study strongly correlated electrons on a kagome lattice at 1/6 and 1/3 filling. They are described by an extended Hubbard Hamiltonian. We are concerned with the limit |t|<<V<<U with hopping amplitude t, nearest-neighbor repulsion V and on-site repulsion U. We derive an effective Hamiltonian and show, with the help of the Perron-Frobenius theorem, that the system is ferromagnetic at low temperatures. The robustness of ferromagnetism is discussed and extensions to other lattices are indicated.Comment: 4 pages, 2 color eps figures; updated version published in Phys. Rev. Lett.; one reference adde

Boson condensation and instability in the tensor network representation of string-net states

The tensor network representation of many-body quantum states, given by local tensors, provides a promising numerical tool for the study of strongly correlated topological phases in two dimension. However, tensor network representations may be vulnerable to instabilities caused by small perturbations of the local tensor, especially when the local tensor is not injective. For example, the topological order in tensor network representations of the toric code ground state has been shown to be unstable under certain small variations of the local tensor, if these small variations do not obey a local $Z_2$ symmetry of the tensor. In this paper, we ask the questions of whether other types of topological orders suffer from similar kinds of instability and if so, what is the underlying physical mechanism and whether we can protect the order by enforcing certain symmetries on the tensor. We answer these questions by showing that the tensor network representation of all string-net models are indeed unstable, but the matrix product operator (MPO) symmetries of the local tensor can help to protect the order. We find that, `stand-alone' variations that break the MPO symmetries lead to instability because they induce the condensation of bosonic quasi-particles and destroy the topological order in the system. Therefore, such variations must be forbidden for the encoded topological order to be reliably extracted from the local tensor. On the other hand, if a tensor network based variational algorithm is used to simulate the phase transition due to boson condensation, then such variation directions must be allowed in order to access the continuous phase transition process correctly.Comment: 44 pages, 85 figures, comments welcom

Infinite density matrix renormalization group for multicomponent quantum Hall systems

While the simplest quantum Hall plateaus, such as the $\nu = 1/3$ state in GaAs, can be conveniently analyzed by assuming only a single active Landau level participates, for many phases the spin, valley, bilayer, subband, or higher Landau level indices play an important role. These `multi-component' problems are difficult to study using exact diagonalization because each component increases the difficulty exponentially. An important example is the plateau at $\nu = 5/2$, where scattering into higher Landau levels chooses between the competing non-Abelian Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian states. We address the methodological issues required to apply the infinite density matrix renormalization group to quantum Hall systems with multiple components and long-range Coulomb interactions, greatly extending accessible system sizes. As an initial application we study the problem of Landau level mixing in the $\nu = 5/2$ state. Within the approach to Landau level mixing used here, we find that at the Coulomb point the anti-Pfaffian is preferred over the Pfaffian state over a range of Landau level mixing up to the experimentally relevant values.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures. v2 added more data for different amounts of Landau level mixing at 5/2 fillin

Time-evolving a matrix product state with long-ranged interactions

We introduce a numerical algorithm to simulate the time evolution of a matrix product state under a long-ranged Hamiltonian. In the effectively one-dimensional representation of a system by matrix product states, long-ranged interactions are necessary to simulate not just many physical interactions but also higher-dimensional problems with short-ranged interactions. Since our method overcomes the restriction to short-ranged Hamiltonians of most existing methods, it proves particularly useful for studying the dynamics of both power-law interacting one-dimensional systems, such as Coulombic and dipolar systems, and quasi two-dimensional systems, such as strips or cylinders. First, we benchmark the method by verifying a long-standing theoretical prediction for the dynamical correlation functions of the Haldane-Shastry model. Second, we simulate the time evolution of an expanding cloud of particles in the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, a subject of several recent experiments.Comment: 5 pages + 3 pages appendices, 4 figure

On confined fractional charges: a simple model

We address the question whether features known from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) can possibly also show up in solid-state physics. It is shown that spinless fermions of charge $e$ on a checkerboard lattice with nearest-neighbor repulsion provide for a simple model of confined fractional charges. After defining a proper vacuum the system supports excitations with charges $\pm e/2$ attached to the ends of strings. There is a constant confining force acting between the fractional charges. It results from a reduction of vacuum fluctuations and a polarization of the vacuum in the vicinity of the connecting strings.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Topological Characterization of Fractional Quantum Hall Ground States from Microscopic Hamiltonians

We show how to numerically calculate several quantities that characterize topological order starting from a microscopic fractional quantum Hall Hamiltonian. To find the set of degenerate ground states, we employ the infinite density matrix renormalization group method based on the matrix-product state representation of fractional quantum Hall states on an infinite cylinder. To study localized quasiparticles of a chosen topological charge, we use pairs of degenerate ground states as boundary conditions for the infinite density matrix renormalization group. We then show that the wave function obtained on the infinite cylinder geometry can be adapted to a torus of arbitrary modular parameter, which allows us to explicitly calculate the non-Abelian Berry connection associated with the modular T transformation. As a result, the quantum dimensions, topological spins, quasiparticle charges, chiral central charge, and Hall viscosity of the phase can be obtained using data contained entirely in the entanglement spectrum of an infinite cylinder