Area law violations and quantum phase transitions in modified Motzkin walk spin chains

Abstract

Area law violations for entanglement entropy in the form of a square root have recently been studied for one-dimensional frustration-free quantum systems based on the Motzkin walks and their variations. Here we consider a Motzkin walk with a different Hilbert space on each step of the walk spanned by the elements of a symmetric inverse semigroup with the direction of each step governed by its algebraic structure. This change alters the number of paths allowed in the Motzkin walk and introduces a ground state degeneracy that is sensitive to boundary perturbations. We study the frustration-free spin chains based on three symmetric inverse semigroups, , and . The system based on and provides examples of quantum phase transitions in one dimension, with the former exhibiting a transition between the area law and a logarithmic violation of the area law and the latter providing an example of transition from logarithmic scaling to a square root scaling in the system size, mimicking a colored system. The system with is much simpler and produces states that continue to obey the area law.