Abstract
Engineering long-range interactions in experimental platforms has been achieved with great success in a large variety of quantum systems in recent years. Inspired by this progress, we propose a generalization of the classical Hamiltonian mean-field model to fermionic particles. We study the phase diagram and thermodynamic properties of the model in the canonical ensemble for ferromagnetic interactions as a function of temperature and hopping. At zero temperature, small charge fluctuations drive the many-body system through a first-order quantum phase transition from an ordered to a disordered phase. At higher temperatures, the fluctuation-induced phase transition remains first order initially and switches to second-order only at a tricritical point. Our results offer an intriguing example of tricriticality in a quantum system with long-range couplings, which bears direct experimental relevance. The analysis is performed by exact diagonalization and mean-field theory.
3 More- Received 23 February 2022
- Accepted 21 July 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.106.024109
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