Spontaneous Parity Breaking in Quantum Antiferromagnets on the Triangular Lattice

Abstract:Frustration on the triangular lattice has long been a source of intriguing and often debated phases in many-body systems. Although symmetry analysis has been employed, the role of the seemingly trivial parity symmetry has received little attention. In this work, we show that phases induced by frustration are systematically shaped by an implicit rule-of-thumb associated with spontaneous parity breaking in weak longitudinal field. This principle enables us to anticipate and rationalize the regimes and conditions under which nontrivial phases emerge. For the spin-$S$ antiferromagnetic XXZ model, we demonstrate that a controversial parity-broken phase appears at intermediate values of $S$. In bilayer systems, enhanced frustration leads to additional phases, such as supersolids, whose properties can be classified by their characteristic parity features. Benefiting from our improved tensor network contraction techniques, we confirm these results through large-scale tensor-network calculations. This study offers an alternative viewpoint and a systematic approach for examining the interplay between spin, symmetry, and frustration in many-body systems.

Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech); High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2602.05901 [cond-mat.str-el]

(or arXiv:2602.05901v2 [cond-mat.str-el] for this version)