Singularities in ground-state fidelity and quantum phase transitions for the Kitaev model

Abstract

The ground-state fidelity per lattice site is shown to be able to detect quantum phase transitions for the Kitaev model on the honeycomb lattice, a prototypical example of quantum lattice systems with topological order. It is found that, in the thermodynamic limit, the ground-state fidelity per lattice site is nonanalytic at the phase boundaries; the second-order derivative of its logarithmic function with respect to a control parameter describing the interaction between neighboring spins is divergent. A finite-size scaling analysis is performed, which allows us to extract the correlation length critical exponent from the scaling behaviors of a part of the ground-state fidelity per lattice site.