Classification of the phases of 1D spin chains with commuting Hamiltonians

Abstract

We consider the class of spin Hamiltonians on a 1D chain with periodic boundary conditions that are (i) translational invariant, (ii) commuting and (iii) scale invariant, where by the latter we mean that the ground state degeneracy is independent of the system size. We correspond a directed graph to a Hamiltonian of this form and show that the structure of its ground space can be read from the cycles of the graph. We show that the ground state degeneracy is the only parameter that distinguishes the phases of these Hamiltonians. Our main tool in this paper is the idea of Bravyi and Vyalyi (2005) in using the representation theory of finite dimensional C^*-algebras to study commuting Hamiltonians.