Caution on emergent continuous symmetry: A Monte Carlo investigation of the transverse-field frustrated Ising model on the triangular and honeycomb lattices

Abstract

Continuous symmetries are believed to emerge at many quantum critical points in frustrated magnets. In this work, we study two candidates of this paradigm: the transverse-field frustrated Ising model (TFFIM) on the triangular and the honeycomb lattices. The former is the prototypical example of this paradigm, and the latter has recently been proposed as another realization. Our large-scale Monte Carlo simulation confirms that the quantum phase transition (QPT) in the triangular lattice TFFIM indeed hosts an emergent O(2) symmetry, but that in the honeycomb lattice TFFIM is a first-order QPT and does not have an emergent continuous symmetry. Furthermore, our analysis of the order-parameter histogram reveals that such different behavior originates from the irrelevance and relevance of anisotropic terms near the QPT in the low-energy effective theory of the two models. The comparison between theoretical analysis and numerical simulation in this work paves the way for scrutinizing investigation of emergent continuous symmetry at classical and quantum phase transitions.