Translation-Invariant Parent Hamiltonians of Valence Bond Crystals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a general method to construct translation-invariant, SU(2) symmetric antiferromagnetic parent Hamiltonians for valence bond crystals, enabling the study of phase transitions and competing orders in quantum spin systems.

Contribution

The authors develop a canonical mapping to create new parent Hamiltonians for VBCs, applicable across various lattices and dimensions, and analyze phase transitions using mean field theory and exact diagonalization.

Findings

VBC phase extends over the exact regime in the constructed Hamiltonians.

Transition from VBC to columnar antiferromagnet involves intermediate phases.

Method reveals competition of correlation lengths at the phase transition.

Abstract

We present a general method to construct translation-invariant and SU(2) symmetric antiferromagnetic parent Hamiltonians of valence bond crystals (VBC). The method is based on a canonical mapping transforming S=1/2 spin operators into a bilinear form of a new set of dimer fermion operators. We construct parent Hamltonians of the columnar- and the staggered-VBC on the square lattice, for which the VBC is an eigenstate in all regimes and the exact ground state in some region of the phase diagram. We study the depart from the exact VBC regime upon tuning the anisotropy by means of the hierarchical mean field theory and exact diagonalization on finite clusters. In both Hamiltonians, the VBC phase extends over the exact regime and transits to a columnar antiferromagnet (CAFM) through a window of intermediate phases, revealing an intriguing competition of correlation lengths at the VBC-CAFM transition. The method can be readily applied to construct other VBC parent Hamiltonians in different lattices and dimensions.