Gappability Index for Quantum Many-Body Systems

Abstract

We propose an index ${\mathcal{I}}_G$ which characterizes the degree of ingappability, namely the difficulty to induce a unique ground state with a nonvanishing excitation gap, in the presence of a symmetry $G$. ${\mathcal{I}}_G$ represents the dimension of the subspace of ambient uniquely-gapped in the entire $G$-invariant "theory space". The celebrated Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem corresponds, in our formulation, to the case ${\mathcal{I}}_G=0$ (completely ingappable) for the symmetry $G$ including the lattice translation symmetry. We illustrate the usefulness of the index by discussing the phase diagram of spin-$1/2$ antiferromagnets in various dimensions, which do not necessarily have the translation symmetry.

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References in corpus (3)

• Topological Defects and Gapless Modes in Insulators and Superconductors
• DMRG studies of critical SU(N) spin chains
• Quantum Criticality in Dimerized Spin Ladders

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• Equivariant Parameter Families of Spin Chains: A Discrete MPS Formulation
• Anisotropy-induced spin parity effects