Textures as a phase-transition probe for quantum spin chains

Abstract

The idea of quantum texture has been recently proposed and used as a tool for quantifying coherences and for quantum gate identification. In this work we offer a study on its usage to quantum phase transitions, demonstrating the rugosity metric as a simple tool for effective phase-transition probing. We establish the link between rugosity in the computational basis and the hierarchy of spin correlators, and analyze rugosities defined in the global ground-state and in ground-states belonging to different magnetization sectors (to which we refer to as global vs symmetry-resolved rugosities) to study the phase diagram of the Heisenberg XXZ model. We find distinct rugosity signatures at both transition points. In particular, a sharp feature appears at $Δ=1$ already for small systems, revealing a pronounced sensitivity of the correlation hierarchy encoded by the texture to this point. Since the BKT transition coincides with the isotropic $SU(2)$ point of the XXZ model, this behavior may reflect a particular sensitivity of rugosity to the structure of the spin-correlation hierarchy at isotropy.