Fidelity and quantum phase transition for the Heisenberg chain with next-nearest-neighbor interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the fidelity for the Heisenberg chain with the next-nearest-neighbor interaction (or the J1-J2 model) and analyze its connections with quantum phase transition. We compute the fidelity between the ground states and find that the phase transition point of the J1-J2 model cannot be well characterized by the ground-state fidelity for finite-size systems. Instead, we introduce and calculate the fidelity between the first excited states. Our results show that the quantum transition can be well characterized by the fidelity of the first excited state even for a small-size system.