Quantum Phase Transitions in Anti-ferromagnetic Planar Cubic Lattices

Motivated by its relation to an NP-hard problem we analyze the ground state properties of anti-ferromagnetic Ising-spin networks in planar cubic lattices under the action of homogeneous transverse and longitudinal magnetic fields. We consider different instances of the cubic geometry and find a set of quantum phase transitions for each one of the systems, which we characterize by means of entanglement behavior and majorization theory. Entanglement scaling at the critical region is in agreement with results arising from conformal symmetry, therefore even the simplest planar systems can display very large amounts of quantum correlation. No conclusion can be made as to the scaling behavior of the minimum energy gap, with the data allowing equally good fits to exponential and power law decays. Analysis of entanglement and especially of majorization instead of the energy spectrum proves to be a good way of detecting quantum phase transitions in highly frustrated configurations