Bath-Engineering Magnetic Order in Quantum Spin Chains: An Analytic Mapping Approach

Spin chains offer a versatile platform for the study of quantum materials. They can capture a wide range of complex and exotic phenomena from magnetic effects to topological phases. These effects are observed in a variety of materials, including quantum magnets, spin liquids, and quantum wires. Beyond ideal models, in reality, environmental degrees of freedom such as lattice phonons or engineered cavity modes couple to the spin degrees of freedom.

Publication Date: June 24, 2024

Authors: Brett Min, Nicholas Anto-Sztrikacs, Marlon Brenes, and Dvira Segal

Abstract:

Dissipative processes can drive different magnetic orders in quantum spin chains. Using a nonperturbative analytic mapping framework, we systematically show how to structure different magnetic orders in spin systems by controlling the locality of the attached baths. Our mapping approach reveals analytically the impact of spin-bath couplings, leading to the suppression of spin splittings, bath dressing and mixing of spin-spin interactions, and emergence of nonlocal ferromagnetic interactions between spins coupled to the same bath, which become long ranged for a global bath. Our general mapping method can be readily applied to a variety of spin models: we demonstrate (i) a bath-induced transition from antiferromagnetic (AFM) to ferromagnetic ordering in a Heisenberg spin chain, (ii) AFM to extended Neel phase ordering within a transverse-field Ising chain with pairwise couplings to baths, and (iii) a quantum phase transition in the fully connected Ising model. Our method is nonperturbative in the system-bath coupling. It holds for a variety of non-Markovian baths and it can be readily applied towards studying bath-engineered phases in frustrated or topological materials.

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