Mean-field treatment of the long-range transverse field Ising model with fermionic Gaussian states

We numerically study the one-dimensional long-range transverse field Ising model (TFIM) in the antiferromagnetic (AFM) regime at zero temperature using generalized Hartree-Fock (GHF) theory. The spin-spin interaction extends to all spins in the lattice and decays as 1/r(alpha), where r denotes the distance between two spins and alpha is a tunable exponent. We map the spin operators to Majorana operators and approximate the ground state of the Hamiltonian with a fermionic Gaussian state (FGS). Using this approximation, we calculate the ground-state energy and the entanglement entropy, which allows us to map the phase diagram for different values of alpha. In addition, we compute the scaling behavior of the entanglement entropy with the system size to determine the central charge at criticality for the case of alpha > 1. For alpha < 1 we find a logarithmic divergence of the entanglement entropy even far away from the critical point, a feature of systems with long-range interactions. We provide a detailed comparison of our results to outcomes of density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and the linked cluster expansion (LCE) methods. In particular, we find excellent agreement of GHF with DMRG and LCE in the weak long-range regime alpha >= 1, and qualitative agreement with DMRG in the strong-long range regime alpha <= 1. Our results highlight the power of the computationally efficient GHF method in simulating interacting quantum systems.

Automated summary

In this study, we numerically investigate the one-dimensional long-range transverse field Ising model (TFIM) in the antiferromagnetic (AFM) regime at zero temperature using generalized Hartree-Fock (GHF) theory. We map the spin operators to Majorana operators and approximate the ground state of the Hamiltonian with a fermionic Gaussian state (FGS). By calculating the ground-state energy and entanglement entropy, we map the phase diagram for different values of the tunable exponent alpha. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of the GHF method in simulating interacting quantum systems.