Geometric phases of reduced states in the transverse-field Ising chain

Abstract

Geometric phases have been extensively investigated in a wide range of quantum systems, often revealing deep connections to the underlying topology of many-body states. In this work, we examine two geometric phases defined for mixed quantum states$-$the interferometric geometric phase and the Uhlmann phase$-$extracted from two-site reduced density matrices of the transverse-field Ising model with nearest-neighbor interacting spins. By applying coordinated local unitary rotations to the spins, we compute the geometric phases associated with the two-site states across the critical point. We find that the interferometric phase is a more reliable indicator of the quantum phase transition in this model than the Uhlmann phase.