The quantum Ising chain for beginners

We consider integrable quantum spin chains with competing interactions. We apply the quantum transfer matrix approach to these spin chains. This allowed us to derive a set of non-linear integral equations for the thermodynamics of these spin chains. We provide numerical solution of these integral equations for the entropy as function of magnetic field, temperature and the coupling constant. This allow us to assess, at low but finite temperature, the picture describing the gro...

The growth in the demand for precisely crafted many-body systems of spin-$1/2$ particles/qubits is due to their top-notch versatility in application-oriented quantum-enhanced protocols and the fundamental tests of quantum theory. Here we address the question: how quantum is a chain of spins? We demonstrate that a single element of the density matrix carries the answer. Properly analyzed it brings information about the extent of the many-body entanglement and the non-locality....

We use network analysis to describe and characterize an archetypal quantum system - an Ising spin chain in a transverse magnetic field. We analyze weighted networks for this quantum system, with link weights given by various measures of spin-spin correlations such as the von Neumann and Renyi mutual information, concurrence, and negativity. We analytically calculate the spin-spin correlations in the system at an arbitrary temperature by mapping the Ising spin chain to fermion...

The confinement of elementary excitations induces distinctive features in the non-equilibrium quench dynamics. One of the most remarkable is the suppression of entanglement entropy which in several instances turns out to oscillate rather than grow indefinitely. While the qualitative physical origin of this behavior is clear, till now no quantitative understanding away from the field theory limit was available. Here we investigate this problem in the weak quench limit, when me...

We investigate the Ising model using the Block Renormalization Group Method (BRGM), focusing on its behavior across different system sizes. The BRGM reduces the number of spins by a factor of 1/2, effectively preserving essential physical features of the Ising model while using only half the spins. Through a comparative analysis, we demonstrate that as the system size increases, there is a convergence between results obtained from the original and renormalized Hamiltonians, p...

Entanglement has developed into an essential concept for the characterization of phases and phase transitions in ground states of quantum many-body systems. In this work, we use the logarithmic negativity to study the spatial entanglement structure in the transverse-field Ising chain both in the ground state and at nonzero temperatures. Specifically, we investigate the entanglement between two disjoint blocks as a function of their separation, which can be viewed as the entan...

Open driven quantum systems have defined a powerful paradigm of non-equilibrium phases and phase transitions; however, quantum phase transitions are generically not expected in this setting due to the decohering effect of dissipation. In this work, we show that a driven-dissipative quantum spin chain exhibits a peculiar sensitivity to the ground-state quantum phase transition. Specifically, we consider a quantum Ising model subject to bulk dissipation (at rate $\Gamma$) and s...

We study the melting of domain walls in the ferromagnetic phase of the transverse Ising chain, created by flipping the order-parameter spins along one-half of the chain. If the initial state is excited by a local operator in terms of Jordan-Wigner fermions, the resulting longitudinal magnetization profiles have a universal character. Namely, after proper rescalings, the profiles in the noncritical Ising chain become identical to those obtained for a critical free-fermion chai...

Using the Jordan-Wigner transformation and continued fractions we calculate rigorously the thermodynamic quantities for the spin-1/2 transverse Ising chain with periodically varying intersite interactions and/or on-site fields. We consider in detail the properties of the chains having a period of the transverse field modulation equal to 3. The regularly alternating transverse Ising chain exhibits several quantum phase transition points, where the number of transition points f...

Quantum spin chains are prototype quantum many-body systems. They are employed in the description of various complex physical phenomena. The goal of this paper is to provide an introduction to the subject by focusing on the time evolution of a Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain and interpreting the results based on the analysis of the eigenvalues, eigenstates, and symmetries of the system. We make available online all computer codes used to obtain our data.