Non-ergodic dynamics of the extended anisotropic Heisenberg chain

Abstract

The issue of ergodicity is often underestimated. The presence of zero-frequency excitations in bosonic Green's functions determine the appearance of zero-frequency momentum-dependent quantities in correlation functions. The implicit dependence of matrix elements make such quantities also relevant in the computation of susceptibilities. Consequently, the correct determination of these quantities is of great relevance and the well-established practice of fixing them by assuming the ergodicity of the dynamics is quite questionable as it is not justifiable a priori by no means. In this manuscript, we have investigated the ergodicity of the dynamics of the $z$-component of the spin in the 1D Heisenberg model with anisotropic nearest-neighbor and isotropic next-nearest-neighbor interactions. We have obtained the zero-temperature phase diagram in the thermodynamic limit by extrapolating Exact and Lanczos diagonalization results computed on chains with sizes $L = 6 \div 26$. Two distinct non-ergodic regions have been found: one for $J^\prime/J_z \lesssim 0.3$ and $|J_\perp|/J_z < 1$ and another for $J^\prime/J_z \lesssim 0.25$ and $|J_\perp|/J_z = 1$. On the contrary, finite-size scaling of $T \neq 0$ results, obtained by means of Exact diagonalization on chains with sizes $L = 4 \div 18$, indicates an ergodic behavior of dynamics in the whole range of parameters.