Stability and absence of a tower of states in ferrimagnets

Abstract

Antiferromagnets and ferromagnets are archetypes of the two distinct (type-A and type-B) ways of spontaneously breaking a continuous symmetry. Although type-B Nambu-Goldstone modes arise in various systems, the ferromagnet was considered pathological due to the stability and symmetry-breaking nature of its exact ground state. However, here we show that symmetry breaking in ferrimagnets closely resembles the ferromagnet. In particular, there is an extensive ground-state degeneracy, there is no Anderson tower of states, and the maximally polarized ground state is thermodynamically stable. Our results are derived analytically for the Lieb-Mattis ferrimagnet and numerically for the Heisenberg ferrimagnet. We argue that these properties are generic for type-B symmetry-broken systems, where the order parameter operator is a symmetry generator.