Quantum Monte Carlo study of the transverse-field quantum Ising model on infinite-dimensional structures

Abstract

In a number of classical statistical-physical models, there exists a characteristic dimensionality called the upper critical dimension above which one observes the mean-field critical behavior. Instead of constructing high-dimensional lattices, however, one can also consider infinite-dimensional structures, and the question is whether this mean-field character extends to quantum-mechanical cases as well. We therefore investigate the transverse-field quantum Ising model on the globally coupled network and the Watts-Strogatz small-world network by means of quantum Monte Carlo simulations and the finite-size scaling analysis. We confirm that both the structures exhibit critical behavior consistent with the mean-field description. In particular, we show that the existing cumulant method has a difficulty in estimating the correct dynamic critical exponent and suggest that an order parameter based on the quantum-mechanical expectation value can be a practically useful numerical observable to determine critical behavior when there is no well-defined dimensionality.