Thermal Tensor Renormalization Group Simulations of Square-Lattice Quantum Spin Models

In this work, we benchmark the well-controlled and numerically accurate exponential thermal tensor renormalization group (XTRG) in the simulation of interacting spin models in two dimensions. Finite temperature introduces a thermal correlation length, which justifies the analysis of finite system size for the sake of numerical efficiency. In this paper we focus on the square lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet (SLH) and quantum Ising models (QIM) on open and cylindrical geometries up to width $W=10$. We explore various one-dimensional mapping paths in the matrix product operator (MPO) representation, whose performance is clearly shown to be geometry dependent. We benchmark against quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) data, yet also the series-expansion thermal tensor network results. Thermal properties including the internal energy, specific heat, and spin structure factors, etc., are computed with high precision, obtaining excellent agreement with QMC results. XTRG also allows us to reach remarkably low temperatures. For SLH we obtain at low temperature an energy per site $u_g^*\simeq -0.6694(4)$ and a spontaneous magnetization $m_S^*\simeq0.30(1)$, which is already consistent with the ground state properties. We extract an exponential divergence vs. $T$ of the structure factor $S(M)$, as well as the correlation length $\xi$, at the ordering wave vector $M=(\pi,\pi)$, which represents the renormalized classical behavior and can be observed over a narrow but appreciable temperature window, by analysing the finite-size data by XTRG simulations. For the QIM with a finite-temperature phase transition, we employ several thermal quantities, including the specific heat, Binder ratio, as well as the MPO entanglement to determine the critical temperature $T_c$.