Quantum correlations in the spin-1/2 Heisenberg XXZ chain with modulated Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

Abstract

We study a one-dimensional spin-1/2 XXZ Heisenberg model with alternating Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, using the numerical Lanczos method. Recently, the ground state (GS) phase diagram of this model has been established using the bosonization approach and extensive density matrix renormalization group computations. Four quantum phases – saturated ferromagnetic (FM), Luttinger liquid (LL), and two (C1 and C2) gapped phases with composite structure of GS order, characterized by the coexistence of long-range alternating dimer, chirality and antiferromagnetic order have been identified. Here we reexamine the same problem using the exact diagonalization Lanczos method for chains up to N=26 sites and explicitly detect positions of quantum critical points (QCP) by investigating the quantum correlations as the entanglement and the quantum discord (QD). It is shown that the entanglement quantified by concurrence and the first derivative of the QD are able to reveal besides the standard FM QCP also the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition point between the LL and the gapped C1 phase and the Ising type critical point separating the C1 and C2 phases.