Lifshitz point at commensurate melting of chains of Rydberg atoms

Natalia Chepiga, Frédéric Mila

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)
34 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The recent investigation of chains of Rydberg atoms has brought back the problem of commensurate-incommensurate transitions into the focus of current research. In two-dimensional classical systems or in one-dimensional quantum systems, the commensurate melting of a period-p phase with p larger than 4 is known to take place through an intermediate floating phase where correlations between domain walls or particles decay only as a power law, but when p is equal to 3 or 4, it has been argued by Huse and Fisher that the transition could also be direct and continuous in a nonconformal chiral universality class with a dynamical exponent larger than 1. This is only possible, however, if the floating phase terminates at a Lifshitz point before reaching the conformal point, a possibility debated since then. Here we argue that this is a generic feature of models where the number of particles is not conserved because the exponent of the floating phase changes along the Pokrovsky-Talapov transition and can, thus, reach the value at which the floating phase becomes unstable. Furthermore, we show numerically that this scenario is realized in an effective model of the period-3 phase of Rydberg chains in which hard-core bosons are created and annihilated three by three: The Luttinger liquid parameter reaches the critical value p2/8=9/8 along the Pokrovsky-Talapov transition, leading to a Lifshitz point that separates the floating phase from a chiral transition. Implications beyond Rydberg atoms are briefly discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Article number023049
Number of pages9
JournalPhysical Review Research
Volume3
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

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