Universal contributions to charge fluctuations in spin chains at finite temperature

Abstract

At finite temperature, conserved charges undergo thermal fluctuations in a quantum many-body system in the grand canonical ensemble. The full structure of the fluctuations of the total U(1) charge $Q$ can be succinctly captured by the generating function $G(\theta)=\left\langle e^{i \theta Q}\right\rangle$. For a 1D translation-invariant spin chain, in the thermodynamic limit the magnitude $|G(\theta)|$ scales with the system size $L$ as $\ln |G(\theta)|=-\alpha(\theta)L+\gamma(\theta)$, where $\gamma(\theta)$ is the scale-invariant contribution and may encode universal information about the underlying system. In this work we investigate the behavior and physical meaning of $\gamma(\theta)$ when the system is periodic. We find that $\gamma(\theta)$ only takes nonzero values at isolated points of $\theta$, which is $\theta=\pi$ for all our examples. In two exemplary lattice systems we show that $\gamma(\pi)$ takes quantized values when the U(1) symmetry exhibits a specific type of 't Hooft anomaly with other symmetries. In other cases, we investigate how $\gamma(\theta)$ depends on microscopic conditions (such as the filling factor) in field theory and exactly solvable lattice models.