Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Two-dimensional Long-range Heisenberg Model

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate spontaneous symmetry breaking and long-range order in the 2D long-range Heisenberg model for decay exponents up to 2, and introduces a random walk model to characterize low-temperature behaviors.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale simulation evidence of symmetry breaking in 2D LR-Heisenberg models and proposes a general criterion for phase transitions in LR systems with continuous symmetry.

Findings

Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs for $\sigma \,\leq\, 2$ in 2D.

LR-SRW accurately characterizes low-temperature scaling behaviors.

A general criterion for phase transitions in LR systems is proposed.

Abstract

The introduction of decaying long-range (LR) interactions $1/r^{d+\sigma}$ has drawn persistent interest in understanding how system properties evolve with $\sigma$. The Sak's criterion and the extended Mermin-Wagner theorem have gained broad acceptance in predicting the critical and low-temperature (low-T) behaviors of such systems. We perform large-scale Monte Carlo simulations for the LR-Heisenberg model in two dimensions (2D) up to linear size $L=8192$, and show that, as long as for $\sigma \leq 2$, the system exhibits spontaneous symmetry breaking, via a single continuous phase transition, and develops a generic long-range order. We then introduce an LR simple random walk (LR-SRW) with the total walk length fixed at O($L^d$), satisfying the extensivity of statistical systems, and observe that the LR-SRW can faithfully characterize the low-T scaling behaviors of the LR-Heisenberg model in both 2D and 3D, as induced by Goldstone-mode fluctuations. Finally, based on insights from LR-SRW, we propose a general criterion for the phase transition and the low-T properties of LR statistical systems with continuous symmetry in any spatial dimension.