Quantum inverse freezing and mirror-glass order*

It is well known that spontaneous symmetry breaking in one spatial dimension is thermodynamically forbidden at finite energy density. Here we show that mirror-symmetric disorder in an interacting quantum system can invert this paradigm, yielding spontaneous breaking of mirror symmetry only at finite energy density and giving rise to “mirror-glass” order. The mirror-glass transition, which occurs via the energetic activation of a finite density of emergent Ising degrees of freedom, is enabled by many-body localization and appears to occur simultaneously with the localization transition. This counterintuitive manifestation of localization-protected order can be viewed as a quantum analog of inverse freezing, a phenomenon that occurs, e.g., in certain models of classical spin glasses.

Reference: T. Iadecola and M. Schecter, Phys. Rev. B 98, 144204 (2018).