Quantum phase transitions and bifurcations: reduced fidelity as a phase transition indicator for quantum lattice many-body systems

Abstract

We establish an intriguing connection between quantum phase transitions and bifurcations in the reduced fidelity between two different reduced density matrices for quantum lattice many-body systems with symmetry-breaking orders. Our finding is based on the observation that, in the conventional Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm, a quantum system undergoing a phase transition is characterized in terms of spontaneous symmetry breaking that is captured by a local order parameter, which in turn results in an essential change of the reduced density matrix in the symmetry-broken phase. Two quantum systems on an infinite lattice in one spatial dimension, i.e., quantum Ising model in a transverse magnetic field and quantum spin 1/2 XYX model in an external magnetic field, are considered in the context of the tensor network algorithm based on the matrix product state representation.