Duality, Criticality, Anomaly, and Topology in Quantum Spin-1 Chains

Abstract: In quantum spin-1 chains, there is a nonlocal unitary transformation known as the Kennedy-Tasaki transformation $U_{\text{KT}}$, which defines a duality between the Haldane phase and the $\mathbb{Z}2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry-breaking phase. In this paper, we find that $U{\text{KT}}$ also defines a duality between a topological Ising critical phase and a trivial Ising critical phase, which provides a "hidden symmetry breaking" interpretation for the topological criticality. Moreover, since the duality relates different phases of matter, we argue that a model with self-duality (i.e., invariant under $U_{\text{KT}}$) is natural to be at a critical or multicritical point. We study concrete examples to demonstrate this argument. In particular, when $H$ is the Hamiltonian of the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain, we prove that the self-dual model $H + U_{\text{KT}} H U_{\text{KT}}$ is exactly equivalent to a gapless spin-$1/2$ XY chain, which also implies an emergent quantum anomaly. On the other hand, we show that the topological and trivial Ising criticalities that are dual to each other meet at a multicritical point which is indeed self-dual.