John Chalker

Abstract:

© 2020 American Physical Society. We consider magnon excitations in the spin-glass phase of geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets with weak exchange disorder, focusing on the nearest-neighbor pyrochlore-lattice Heisenberg model at large spin. The low-energy degrees of freedom in this system are represented by three copies of a U(1) emergent gauge field, related by global spin-rotation symmetry. We show that the Goldstone modes associated with spin-glass order are excitations of these gauge fields, and that the standard theory of Goldstone modes in Heisenberg spin glasses (due to Halperin and Saslow) must be modified in this setting.

Abstract:

We investigate spectral statistics in spatially extended, chaotic many-body quantum systems with a conserved charge. We compute the spectral form factor $K(t)$ analytically for a minimal Floquet circuit model that has a $U(1)$ symmetry encoded via auxiliary spin-$1/2$ degrees of freedom. Averaging over an ensemble of realizations, we relate $K(t)$ to a partition function for the spins, given by a Trotterization of the spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg ferromagnet. Using Bethe Ansatz techniques, we extract the 'Thouless time' $t^{\vphantom{*}}_{\rm Th}$ demarcating the extent of random matrix behavior, and find scaling behavior governed by diffusion for $K(t)$ at $t\lesssim t^{\vphantom{*}}_{\rm Th}$. We also report numerical results for $K(t)$ in a generic Floquet spin model, which are consistent with these analytic predictions.