Local symmetries and extensive ground-state degeneracy of a 1D supersymmetric fermionic chain

TL;DR

This paper investigates a 1D supersymmetric fermionic chain, revealing extensive ground-state degeneracy and local symmetries, with exact solutions and combinatorial insights into the degeneracy structure.

Contribution

It provides an exact combinatorial solution for the ground-state degeneracy and demonstrates how to systematically construct ground states using immobile fermion walls.

Findings

Ground-state degeneracy scales exponentially with system size.

Recurrence relations between different system sizes are established.

Explicit mappings and combinatorial explanations for degeneracy are provided.

Abstract

We study a $1$D supersymmetric (SUSY) hard-core fermion model first proposed by Fendley, Schoutens, and de Boer [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 120402 (2003)]. We focus on the full Hilbert space instead of a restricted subspace. Exact diagonalization shows the degeneracy of zero-energy states scales exponentially with size of the system, with a recurrence relation between different system sizes. We solve the degeneracy problem by showing the ground states can be systematically constructed by inserting immobile walls of fermions into the chain. Mapping the counting problem to a combinatorial one and obtaining the exact generating function, we prove the recurrence relation on both open and periodic chains. We also provide an explicit mapping between ground states, giving a combinatorial explanation of the recurrence relation.