2018/12/13 by Eun-Gook Moon, Moon, Eun-Gook
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum many-body systems #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1812.05621
openalex publication_date 2018/12/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Fathoming deconfined phases is one of the key issues in modern condensed matter. Striking many-body effects including massive quantum entanglement and coherence may be realized as manifested in quantum spin liquids and topological orders. Here, we demonstrate that deconfined phases even host exotic thermal phase transitions, dubbed deconfined thermal transitions. Constructing a Z2 lattice gauge model with strong interactions between Z2 gauge fluxes, we prove the existence of a thermal phase transition between deconfined and confined phases in two spatial dimensions in sharp contrast to its absence in the Wegner model. Incorporating deconfined fermions, it is shown that gapless excitations from Fermi surfaces endow line-tension to Z2 gauge fluxes at zero temperature, and we argue that a deconfined thermal transition with deconfined fermions may be interpreted as a hidden order transition with thermal gap-opening in Fermi surfaces. Moreover, it is shown that symmetry breaking transitions in deconfined phases may be unconventional. Global Z2 and U(1) symmetry breaking transitions in deconfined phases may be in the same universality class, which is impossible under the conventional Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm. Characteristic signatures of the transitions in experiments and candidate strongly correlated systems such as Kitaev materials are also discussed.