Supersymmetric Quantum Spherical Spins

TL;DR

This paper studies a supersymmetric quantum spherical model, revealing unique quantum and thermal phase transitions, and computes critical exponents, with implications for understanding supersymmetry in condensed matter systems.

Contribution

It introduces a supersymmetric extension of the quantum spherical model using an off-shell superspace formulation and analyzes its critical behavior and phase transitions.

Findings

The mean-field supersymmetric model exhibits a quantum phase transition without breaking supersymmetry.

There is a finite-temperature phase transition with broken supersymmetry.

Critical exponents for magnetization and susceptibility are computed in different regimes.

Abstract

In this work we investigate properties of a supersymmetric extension of the quantum spherical model from an off-shell formulation directly in the superspace. This is convenient to safely handle the constraint structure of the model in a way compatible with supersymmetry. The model is parametrized by an interaction energy, $U_{{\bf r},{\bf r}'}$, which governs the interactions between the superfields of different sites. We briefly discuss some consequences when $U_{{\bf r},{\bf r}'}$ corresponds to the case of first-neighbor interactions. After computing the partition function via saddle point method for a generic interaction, $U_{{\bf r},{\bf r}'}\equiv U(|{\bf r}-{\bf r}'|)$, we focus in the mean-field version, which reveals an interesting critical behavior. In fact, the mean-field supersymmetric model exhibits a quantum phase transition without breaking supersymmetry at zero temperature, as well as a phase transition at finite temperature with broken supersymmetry. We compute critical exponents of the usual magnetization and susceptibility in both cases of zero and finite temperature. Concerning the susceptibility, there are two regimes in the case of finite temperature characterized by distinct critical exponents. The entropy is well behaved at low temperature, vanishing as $T \rightarrow 0$