Numerical Contractor Renormalization Method for Quantum Spin Models

TL;DR

The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the numerical Contractor Renormalization (CORE) method for quantum spin models, enabling semi-quantitative analysis of complex systems and quantum phase transitions beyond standard exact diagonalization capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-quantitative numerical CORE approach for quantum spin systems, validated on ladder, plaquette, and kagome lattices, and extends the analysis to larger system sizes.

Findings

CORE accurately describes phase transitions in the plaquette lattice.

The twofold degenerate basis explains many phenomena in the kagome system.

System sizes up to 8x8 or 48 sites are accessible, surpassing standard methods.

Abstract

We demonstrate the utility of the numerical Contractor Renormalization (CORE) method for quantum spin systems by studying one and two dimensional model cases. Our approach consists of two steps: (i) building an effective Hamiltonian with longer ranged interactions using the CORE algorithm and (ii) solving this new model numerically on finite clusters by exact diagonalization. This approach, giving complementary information to analytical treatments of the CORE Hamiltonian, can be used as a semi-quantitative numerical method. For ladder type geometries, we explicitely check the accuracy of the effective models by increasing the range of the effective interactions. In two dimensions we consider the plaquette lattice and the kagome lattice as non-trivial test cases for the numerical CORE method. On the plaquette lattice we have an excellent description of the system in both the disordered and the ordered phases, thereby showing that the CORE method is able to resolve quantum phase transitions. On the kagome lattice we find that the previously proposed twofold degenerate S=1/2 basis can account for a large number of phenomena of the spin 1/2 kagome system. For spin 3/2 however this basis does not seem to be sufficient anymore. In general we are able to simulate system sizes which correspond to an 8x8 lattice for the plaquette lattice or a 48-site kagome lattice, which are beyond the possibilities of a standard exact diagonalization approach.