The quantum Heisenberg model, developed by Werner Heisenberg, is a statistical mechanical model used in the study of critical points and phase transitions of magnetic systems, in which the spins of the magnetic systems are treated quantum mechanically. It is related to the prototypical Ising model, where at each site of a lattice, a spin represents a microscopic magnetic dipole to which the magnetic moment is either up or down. Except the coupling between magnetic dipole moments, there is also a multipolar version of Heisenberg model called the multipolar exchange interaction.
Overview
For quantum mechanical reasons (see exchange interaction or ), the dominant coupling between two dipoles may cause nearest-neighbors to have lowest energy when they are aligned. Under this assumption (so that magnetic interactions only occur between adjacent dipoles) and on a 1-dimensional periodic lattice, the Hamiltonian can be written in the form
,
where is the coupling constant and dipoles are represented by classical vectors (or "spins") σj, subject to the periodic boundary condition . The Heisenberg model is a more realistic model in that it treats the spins quantum-mechanically, by replacing the spin by a quantum operator acting upon the tensor product , of dimension . To define it, recall the Pauli spin-1/2 matrices
,
,
,
and for and denote , where is the identity matrix. Given a choice of real-valued coupling constants and , the Hamiltonian is given by
where the on the right-hand side indicates the external magnetic field, with periodic boundary conditions. The objective is to determine the spectrum of the Hamiltonian, from which the partition function can be calculated and the thermodynamics of the system can be studied.
It is common to name the model depending on the values of , and : if , the model is called the Heisenberg XYZ model; in the case of , it is the Heisenberg XXZ model; if , it is the Heisenberg XXX model. The spin 1/2 Heisenberg model in one dimension may be solved exactly using the Bethe ansatz. In the algebraic formulation, these are related to particular quantum affine algebras and elliptic quantum groups in the XXZ and XYZ cases respectively. Other approaches do so without Bethe ansatz.
XXX model
The physics of the Heisenberg XXX model strongly depends on the sign of the coupling constant and the dimension of the space. For positive the ground state is always ferromagnetic. At negative the ground state is antiferromagnetic in two and three dimensions. In one dimension the nature of correlations in the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model depends on the spin of the magnetic dipoles. If the spin is integer then only short-range order is present. A system of half-integer spins exhibits quasi-long range order.
A simplified version of Heisenberg model is the one-dimensional Ising model, where the transverse magnetic field is in the x-direction, and the interaction is only in the z-direction:
.
At small g and large g, the ground state degeneracy is different, which implies that there must be a quantum phase transition in between. It can be solved exactly for the critical point using the duality analysis. The duality transition of the Pauli matrices is and , where and are also Pauli matrices which obey the Pauli matrix algebra. Under periodic boundary conditions, the transformed Hamiltonian can be shown is of a very similar form:
but for the attached to the spin interaction term. Assuming that there's only one critical point, we can conclude that the phase transition happens at .
Solution by Bethe ansatz
XXX1/2 model
Following the approach of , the spectrum of the Hamiltonian for the XXX model
can be determined by the Bethe ansatz. In this context, for an appropriately defined family of operators dependent on a spectral parameter acting on the total Hilbert space with each , a Bethe vector is a vector of the form
where . If the satisfy the Bethe equation
then the Bethe vector is an eigenvector of with eigenvalue .
The family as well as three other families come from a transfer matrix (in turn defined using a Lax matrix), which acts on along with an auxiliary space , and can be written as a block matrix with entries in ,