Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2024 / iii / Paper 343 / 2

Write the spin-one-half Heisenberg antiferromagnet ason a bipartite lattice of coordination number $z$. A one-spin density operator is $\rho =(I+\mathbf{r}\cdot \mathbf{\sigma })/2$, where $\mathbf{r}$ is its Bloch vector and $|\mathbf{r}|\le 1$. In a two-sublattice product state,The minimum is $-1/4$, attained by pure antiparallel Bloch vectors, so the minimizing product state is a Néel state. In the $z\to \infty$ limit this mean-field approximation becomes exact and the ground-state energy per bond is therefore

The phrase “energy density” requires a coupling convention. For the unscaled Hamiltonian above, every site belongs to $z/2$ bonds andwhich diverges as $z\to \infty$. With the standard Kac normalizationthe finite energy density isIf the convention divides by the spatial dimension $d=z/2$ instead, the answer is $-J/4$ per site. A Hamiltonian written with ${\mathbf{\sigma }}_i\cdot {\mathbf{\sigma }}_j$ rather than ${\mathbf{S}}_i\cdot {\mathbf{S}}_j$ multiplies all these energies by four.

The Quantum de Finetti theorem says that the fixed-$k$ reduced density matrix of an exchangeable $N$-particle state approachesas $N\to \infty$. Finite versions bound the trace norm error by a constant of order $d_{\mathrm{loc}}^{2}k/N$. On a bipartite lattice, the corresponding two-sublattice form is a mixtureThis is the mean-field ansatz from the quantum de Finetti theorem.

The bond energy is a linear functional of ${\rho }_{AB}$. A convex combination cannot have energy below its lowest product component, so it remains only to minimizeThe Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives ${\mathbf{r}}_A\cdot {\mathbf{r}}_B\ge -|{\mathbf{r}}_A||{\mathbf{r}}_B|\ge -1$, with equality for pure antiparallel vectors. This reproduces the Néel state and $-J/4$ per bond found in part (a).

Yes, the limiting state saturates the de Finetti mean-field lower bound: the minimizing product state belongs to the allowed de Finetti mixture, and the finite-de-Finetti error tends to zero as $z\to \infty$. At finite $z$ the theorem gives only an approximation; entanglement and correlated fluctuations can lower the energy below the product-state value by corrections that vanish in the infinite-coordination limit.