Entanglement signatures for the dimerization transition in the Majumdar-Ghosh model

Abstract

The transition from a gapless liquid to a gapped dimerized ground state that occurs in the frustrated antiferromagnetic Majumdar-Ghosh (or J1−J2 Heisenberg) model is revisited from the point of view of entanglement. We study the evolution of entanglement spectra, a “projected subspace” block entropy, and concurrence in the Schmidt vectors through the transition. The standard tool of Schmidt decomposition along with the existence of the unique Majumdar-Ghosh (MG) point where the ground states are degenerate and known exactly suggest the projection into two orthogonal subspaces that is useful even away from this point. Of these, one is a dominant five-dimensional subspace containing the complete state at the MG point and the other contributes marginally, albeit with increasing weight as the number of spins is increased. We find that the marginally contributing subspace has a minimum von Neumann entropy in the vicinity of the dimerization transition. Entanglement content between pairs of spins in the Schmidt vectors, studied via concurrence, shows that those belonging to the dominant five-dimensional subspace display a clear progress towards dimerization as the MG point is approached. In contrast, study of the Schmidt vectors in the marginally contributing subspace, as well as in the projection of the ground state in this space, display pair concurrence which decreases on both sublattices as the MG point is approached. The robustness of these observations indicate their possible usefulness in the study of models that have similar transitions, and have hitherto been difficult to study using standard entanglement signatures.