Gapless symmetry-protected topological phase of quantum antiferromagnets on anisotropic triangular strip

Bibliographic Information

Published
2022-10-28
Resource Type
journal article
Rights Information
  • https://link.aps.org/licenses/aps-default-license
DOI
  • 10.1103/physrevb.106.144436
  • 10.48550/arxiv.2205.15525
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)

Search this article

Description

We study a three-leg spin-1/2 ladder with geometrically frustrated interleg interactions. We call this model an anisotropic triangular-strip (ATS) model. We numerically and field-theoretically show that its ground state belongs to a gapless symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase. The numerical approach is based on density-matrix renormalization group analyses of the entanglement entropy and the entanglement spectrum. Whereas the entanglement entropy exhibits a critical behavior, the entanglement spectrum is nontrivially degenerate. These entanglement properties imply that the ground state is a gapless topological phase. We investigate the ATS model using a quantum field theory to support the numerical findings. When the frustrated interchain interaction is deemed a perturbation acting on the three spin chains, the frustrated interchain interaction almost isolates the second chain from the other two chains. However, at the same time, the second chain mediates a ferromagnetic interaction between the first and third chains. Therefore, the ground state of the ATS model is a gapless Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid weakly coupled to a spin-1 Haldane chain with irrelevant interactions. Last but not least, we show that the gapless SPT phase of the ATS model is a symmetry-protected critical phase. We point out that the symmetry protection of criticality is essential in characterization of the gapless SPT phase.

Journal

  • Physical Review B

    Physical Review B 106 (14), 144436-, 2022-10-28

    American Physical Society (APS)

Citations (1)*help

See more

References(52)*help

See more

Related Projects

See more

Report a problem

Back to top