Temperature effects on the dynamics of the 1-D transverse Ising model with four-spin interactions

The dynamics of one-dimensional quantum spin systems has been a long standing theoretical and experimental problem. Among them, the transverse Ising model with multi-spin interactions, regarded as one of the simplest with non-trivial dynamics, has attracted considerable interest in recent years. We investigate the temperature effects on the dynamics of the transverse Ising model with four-spin interactions. The model is relevant to the physics of poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene)[P(VDF-TrFE)] copolymers. We determine the time-dependent correlation function and spectral density for all temperatures for cases where the transverse field B is less, equal or greater than the four-spin coupling J. Our calculations were done with rings of up to 11 spins. However the results presented are also valid in the thermodynamic limit. We find that the time-dependent correlation function in general has oscillatory behavior when the transverse field is stronger than the coupling energy. On the other hand, when the field is weaker the real part of the time-dependent correlation function decreases monotonically at high enough temperatures. The temperature effects are best seen from the spectral density: at zero temperature the system can only absorb energy and, as the temperature is raised, the correlation functions keep memory of the zero-temperature quantum phases. Such feature persists up to the infinite temperature limit.