Adiabatic Ground-State Properties of Spin Chains with Twisted Boundary Conditions

Abstract

We study the Heisenberg spin chain with twisted boundary conditions, focusing on the adiabatic flow of the energy spectrum as a function of the twist angle. In terms of effective field theory for the nearest-neighbor model, we show that the period 2 (in unit $2\pi$) obtained by Sutherland and Shastry arises from irrelevant perturbations around the massless fixed point, and that this period may be rather general for one-dimensional interacting lattice models at half filling. In contrast, the period for the Haldane-Shastry spin model with $1/r^2$ interaction has a different and unique origin for the period, namely, it reflects fractional statistics in Haldane's sense.