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

Abstract

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 $1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, where $r$ denotes the distance between two spins and $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ 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 $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. 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 $\ensuremath{\alpha}>1$. For $\ensuremath{\alpha}<1$ 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 $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\ge}1$, and qualitative agreement with DMRG in the strong-long range regime $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}1$. Our results highlight the power of the computationally efficient GHF method in simulating interacting quantum systems.