We study quantum phase transitions induced by the on-site spin-orbit interaction lambda(L.S) in a toy model of vanadium chains. In the lambda->0 limit, the decoupled spin and orbital sectors are described by a Haldane and an Ising chain, respectively. The gapped ground state is composed of a ferro-orbital order and a spin liquid with finite correlation lengths. In the opposite limit, strong spin-orbital entanglement results in a simultaneous spin and orbital-moment ordering, which can be viewed as an orbital liquid. Using a combination of analytical arguments and density-matrix renormalization group calculation, we show that an intermediate phase, where the ferro-orbital state is accompanied by a spin Neel order, is bounded on both sides by Ising transition lines. Implications for vanadium compounds CaV2O4 and ZnV2O4 are also discussed.
Vanadium spinels (ZnV_2O_4, MgV_2O_4, and CdV_2O_4) exhibit a sequence of structural and magnetic phase transitions, reflecting the interplay of lattice, orbital, and spin degrees of freedom. We offer a theoretical model taking into account the relativistic spin-orbit interaction, collective Jahn-Teller effect, and spin frustration. Below the structural transition, vanadium ions exhibit ferroorbital order and the magnet is best viewed as two sets of antiferromagnetic chains with a single-ion Ising anisotropy. Magnetic order, parametrized by two Ising variables, appears at a tetracritical point…
We have theoretically studied successive transitions in vanadium spinel oxides with (t_2g)^2 electron configuration. These compounds show a structural transition at ~ 50K and an antiferromagnetic transition at ~ 40K. Since threefold t_2g orbitals of vanadium cations are occupied partially and vanadiums constitute a geometrically-frustrated pyrochlore lattice, the system provides a particular example to investigate the interplay among spin, orbital and lattice degrees of freedom on frustrated lattice. We examine the models with the Jahn-Teller coupling and/or the spin-orbital superexchange inte…
We formulate the effective Gross-Neveu-Yukawa theory of the semimetal-insulator transitions on the honeycomb lattice and compute its quantum critical behavior near three (spatial) dimensions. We find that at the critical point Dirac fermions do not survive as coherent excitations and that the $\sim 1/r$ tail of the weak Coulomb interaction is an irrelevant coupling. The emergent Lorentz invariance near criticality implies a universal ratio of the low-temperature specific heats of the metallic and the rotational-symmetry-broken insulating phase.
Topological quantum phase transitions intrinsically intertwine self-similarity and topology of many-electron wave-functions, and divining them is one of the most significant ways to advance understanding in condensed matter physics. Our focus is to investigate an unconventional class of the transitions between insulators and Dirac semimetals whose description is beyond conventional pseudo relativistic Dirac Hamiltonian. At the transition without the long-range Coulomb interaction, the electronic energy dispersion along one direction behaves like a relativistic particle, linear in momentum, but…
We present an analytical model of orbital ordering in vanadium spinel MnV2O4. The model is based on recent first-principles calculation indicating a strong trigonal distortion at the vanadium sites of this compound [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 216405 (2009)]. At the single-ion level, the trigonal crystal field leaves a doubly degenerate atomic ground state and breaks the approximate rotational symmetry of t2g orbitals. We find that the effective interaction between the low-energy doublets is described by a quantum antiferromagnetic 120-degree model on the pyrochlore lattice. We obtain the classical …
Magnetic correlations in all four phases of pure and doped vanadium sesquioxide V_2O_3 have been examined by magnetic thermal neutron scattering. While the antiferromagnetic insulator can be accounted for by a Heisenberg localized spin model, the long range order in the antiferromagnetic metal is an incommensurate spin-density-wave, resulting from a Fermi surface nesting instability. Spin dynamics in the strongly correlated metal are dominated by spin fluctuations in the Stoner electron-hole continuum. Furthermore, our results in metallic V_2O_3 represent an unprecedentedly complete characteri…
We present a novel approach to study the ground state and elementary excitations in compounds where spins and orbitals are entangled by on-site relativistic spin-orbit interaction. The appropriate degrees of freedom are localized states with an effective angular momentum J. We generalize J to arbitrary large values while maintaining the delicate spin-orbital entanglement. After projecting the inter-site exchange interaction to the manifold of effective spins, a systematic 1/J expansion of the effective Hamiltonian is realized using the Holstein-Primakoff transformation. Applications to represe…
Topological phase transitions in condensed matters accompany emerging singularities of the electronic wave function, often manifested by gap-closing points in the momentum space. In conventional topological insulators in three dimensions (3D), the low energy theory near the gap-closing point can be described by relativistic Dirac fermions coupled to the long range Coulomb interaction, hence the quantum critical point of topological phase transitions provides a promising platform to test the novel predictions of quantum electrodynamics. Here we show that a new class of quantum critical phenomen…
We consider relativistic U(1) gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions, with N_b species of complex bosons and N_f species of Dirac fermions at finite temperature. The quantum phase transition between the Higgs and Coulomb phases is described by a conformal field theory (CFT). At large N_b and N_f, but for arbitrary values of the ratio N_b/N_f, we present computations of various critical exponents and universal amplitudes for these CFTs. We make contact with the different spin-liquids, charge-liquids and deconfined critical points of quantum magnets that these field theories describe. We compute physi…
Duality places an important constraint on the renormalization group flows and the phase diagrams. For self-dual theories, the self-duality can be promoted as a symmetry, this leads to the multi-criticalities. This work investigates a description of the deconfined quantum criticality, the $N_f=2$ QED$_3$, as an example of self-dual theories and its multi-critical behavior under perturbative deformations. The multi-criticality is described by the theory with Gross-Neveu couplings and falls in a different universality class than the standard deconfined quantum criticality. We systematically calcu…
We study the relativistic O(N) field theory near the quantum critical point in 2+1 dimensions for N=2 and N=3. The scalar susceptibility is evaluated by Monte Carlo simulation. We show that the spectrum contains a peak associated with the Higgs mode, which remains well-defined all the way to the critical point. The fidelity of this peak and the amplitude ratio between the critical energy scales on both sides of the transition are computed.
Long-range quantum lattice systems often exhibit drastically different behavior than their short-range counterparts. In particular, because they do not satisfy the conditions for the Lieb-Robinson theorem, they need not have an emergent relativistic structure in the form of a light cone. Adopting a field-theoretic approach, we study the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model with long-range interactions, and a fermionic model with long-range hopping and pairing terms, explore their critical and near-critical behavior, and characterize their response to local perturbations. We deduce the …
We present a family of nonrelativistic Yang-Mills gauge theories in D+1 dimensions whose free-field limit exhibits quantum critical behavior with gapless excitations and dynamical critical exponent z=2. The ground state wavefunction is intimately related to the partition function of relativistic Yang-Mills in D dimensions. The gauge couplings exhibit logarithmic scaling and asymptotic freedom in the upper critical spacetime dimension, equal to 4+1. The theories can be deformed in the infrared by a relevant operator that restores Poincare invariance as an accidental symmetry. In the large-N lim…
We present finite temperature extension of the QED$_3$ theory of underdoped cuprates. The theory describes nodal quasiparticles whose interactions with quantum proliferated vortex-antivortex pairs are represented by an emergent U(1) gauge field. Finite temperature introduces a scale beyond which the long wavelength fluctuations in the spatial components of vorticity are suppressed. As a result, the spin susceptibility of the pseudogap state is bounded by $T^2$ at low T and crosses over to $\sim T$ at higher $T$, while the low-$T$ electronic specific heat scales as $T^2$, reflecting the thermod…
A holographic model of a quantum critical theory at a finite but low temperature, and finite density is studied. The model exhibits non-relativistic z=2 Schrödinger symmetry and is realized by the Anti-de-Sitter-Schwarzschild black hole in light-cone coordinates. Our approach addresses the electrical conductivities in the presence or absence of an applied magnetic field and contains a control parameter that can be associated to quantum tuning via charge carrier doping or an external field in correlated electron systems. The Ohmic resistivity, the inverse Hall angle, the Hall coefficient and th…
The critical behavior of a relativistic $\mathbb{Z}_2$-symmetric Yukawa model at zero temperature and density is discussed for a continuous number of fermion degrees of freedom and of spacetime dimensions, with emphasis on the role played by multi-meson exchange in the Yukawa sector. We argue that this should be generically taken into account in studies based on the functional renormalization group, either in four-dimensional high-energy models or in lower-dimensional condensed-matter systems. By means of the latter method, we describe the generation of multi-critical models in less then three…
We investigate a model of hard-core bosons with infinitely repulsive nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions in one dimension, introduced by Fendley, Sengupta and Sachdev in Phys. Rev. B 69, 075106 (2004). Using a combination of exact diagonalization, tensor network, and quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we show how an intermediate incommensurate phase separates a crystalline and a disordered phase. We base our analysis on a variety of diagnostics, including entanglement measures, fidelity susceptibility, correlation functions, and spectral properties. According to theoretical expectati…
Relativistic O(N) field theories are studied near the quantum critical point in two space dimensions. We compute dynamical correlations by large scale Monte Carlo simulations and numerical analytic continuation. In the ordered side, the scalar spectral function exhibits a universal peak at the Higgs mass. For N=3 and 4 we confirm its ω^3 rise at low frequency. On the disordered side, the spectral function exhibits a sharp gap. For N=2, the dynamical conductivity rises above a threshold at the Higgs mass (density gap), in the superfluid (Mott insulator) phase. For charged bosons, (Josephson arr…
We study the phase diagram of an effective model of competing nematic and antiferromagnetic orders of interacting electrons on the Bernal-stacked honeycomb bilayer, as relevant for bilayer graphene. In the noninteracting limit, the model features a semimetallic ground state with quadratic band touching points at the Fermi level. Taking the effects of short-range interactions into account, we demonstrate the existence of an extended region in the mean-field phase diagram characterized by coexisting nematic and antiferromagnetic orders. By means of a renormalization group approach, we reveal tha…
Controlling Collective Phenomena Via the Quantum State of Interaction-Mediators: Changing the Criticality of Photon-Mediated Superconductivity Via Fock States of Light
We present a general framework for deriving effective spin Hamiltonians of correlated magnetic systems based on a combination of relativistic ab initio density functional theory calculations (DFT), exact diagonalization of a generalized Hubbard Hamiltonian on finite clusters and spin projections onto the low-energy subspace. A key motivation is to determine anisotropic bilinear exchange couplings in materials of interest. As an example, we apply this method to the pyrochlore Lu$_2$V$_2$O$_7$ where the vanadium ions form a lattice of corner-sharing spin-1/2 tetrahedra. In this compound, anisotr…
Motivated by recent experiments on quasi-1D vanadium oxides, we study quantum phase transitions in a one-dimensional spin-orbital model describing a Haldane chain and a classical Ising chain locally coupled by the relativistic spin-orbit interaction. By employing a field-theoretical approach, we analyze the topology of the ground-state phase diagram and identify the nature of the phase transitions. In the strong coupling limit, a long-range Néel order of entangled spin and orbital angular momentum appears in the ground state. We find that, depending on the relative scales of the spin and orbit…
Motivated by the appearance of a `reflection symmetry' in transport experiments and the absence of statistical periodicity in relativistic quantum field theories, we propose a series of relativistic composite fermion theories for the compressible states appearing at filling fractions $ν=1/2n$ in quantum Hall systems. These theories consist of electrically neutral Dirac fermions attached to $2n$ flux quanta via an emergent Chern-Simons gauge field. While not possessing an explicit particle-hole symmetry, these theories reproduce the known Jain sequence states proximate to $ν=1/2n$, and we show …
A key problem in the field of quantum criticality is to understand the nature of quantum phase transitions in systems of interacting itinerant fermions, motivated by experiments on a variety of strongly correlated materials. Much attention has been paid in recent years to two-dimensional (2D) materials in which itinerant fermions acquire a pseudo-relativistic Dirac dispersion, such as graphene, topological insulator surfaces, and certain spin liquids. This article reviews the phenomenology and theoretical description of quantum phase transitions in systems of 2D Dirac fermions.
An important yet largely unsolved problem in the statistical mechanics of disordered quantum systems is to understand how quenched disorder affects quantum phase transitions in systems of itinerant fermions. In the clean limit, continuous quantum phase transitions of the symmetry-breaking type in Dirac materials such as graphene and the surfaces of topological insulators are described by relativistic (2+1)-dimensional quantum field theories of the Gross-Neveu-Yukawa (GNY) type. We study the universal critical properties of the chiral Ising, XY, and Heisenberg GNY models perturbed by quenched r…
We consider a one-dimensional commensurate Peierls insulator in the presence of spin-dependent sign-alternating potentials. In a continuum description, the latter supply the fermions with spin-dependent "relativistic" masses $m_{\uparrow,\downarrow}$. The ground-state phase diagram describes three gapped phases: the CDW and SDW-like band insulator phases sandwiched by a "mixed" phase in which the CDW and SDW superstructures coexist with a nonzero spontaneous dimerization (SD). The critical lines separating the massive phases belong to the Ising universality class. The Ising criticality is acco…
