Conformal, Subconformal and Spectral Universality in Incommensurate Spin Chains

Abstract

A renormalization scheme is developed to study an anisotropic quantum XY spin chain in a quasiperiodic transverse field. The critical phase of the quasi-particle excitations of the model with fractal wave functions exists in a finite parameter interval and is sandwiched between the extended and localized phases. The scaling properties of the critical phase fall into four distinct universality classes referred as spectral, subconformal, conformal and Harper. The spectral and conformal classes respectively describe the onsets of extended to critical and critical to localized transitions while the subconformal class describes the part of the phase diagram sandwiched between the conformal and spectral transitions. The Harper universality class describes the isotropic limit of the XY model. A decimation scheme is developed to compute the infinite sets of universal scaling ratios characterizing the wave functions in the four universality classes. The renormalization flow equations exhibit a limit cycle at the band center and at the band edges providing a new method for determining these energies with extremely high precision.