Entanglement and logarithmic spirals in a quantum spin-1 many-body system with competing dimer and trimer interactions

TL;DR

This paper explores a quantum spin-1 system with competing interactions, revealing complex symmetry breaking, emergent fractal structures, and scale-invariant entanglement properties linked to Goldstone modes and ground state degeneracies.

Contribution

It uncovers novel symmetry-breaking patterns, emergent self-similar structures, and a universal entanglement scaling law in a highly degenerate quantum spin system.

Findings

Ground state degeneracies are exponential and related to self-similar logarithmic spirals.

Entanglement entropy scales with the number of Goldstone modes, indicating scale invariance.

Exact Schmidt decomposition reveals fractal-like self-similarities in ground states.

Abstract

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) with type-B Goldstone modes is investigated in the macroscopically degenerate phase for a quantum spin-1 many-body system with competing dimer and trimer interactions. The SSB involves three distinct patterns. The first occurs at the dimer point, with the pattern from staggered ${\rm SU}(3)$ to ${\rm U}(1)\times{\rm U}(1)$. The second occurs at the trimer point, with the pattern from uniform ${\rm SU}(3)$ to ${\rm U}(1)\times{\rm U}(1)$. The third occurs in the dimer-trimer regime, with the pattern from uniform ${\rm SU}(2)$ to ${\rm U}(1)$. The number of type-B Goldstone modes is thus two, two and one for the three patterns, respectively. The ground state degeneracies arising from the three patterns are exponential with the system size, which may be recognized as sequences of integers relevant to self-similar logarithmic spirals. This in turn is attributed to the presence of an emergent symmetry operation tailored to a specific degenerate ground state. As a consequence, the residual entropy is non-zero, which measures the disorder present in a unit cell of highly degenerate ground state generated from a generalized highest weight state. An exact Schmidt decomposition exists for the highly degenerate ground states, thus exposing the self-similarities underlying an abstract fractal, described by the fractal dimension. The latter is extracted from performing a universal finite system-size scaling analysis of the entanglement entropy, which is identical to the number of type-B Goldstone modes. The model under investigation thus accommodates an exotic scale invariant quantum state of matter.