We study a system involving a single quantum degree of freedom per site of the lattice interacting with a few neighbors (up to second neighbors), with the interactions chosen so as to produce frustration. At zero temperature, this system undergoes several quantum phase transitions from both gapped to gapless and gapless to gapless phases, providing a very rich phase structure with disordered, homogeneous, and modulated ordered phases meeting in a quantum Lifshitz point. The gapless phases spontaneously break spatial lattice translations as well as internal symmetries of the form $\text{U}{\left(1\right)}^{{\mathsf{N}}_c}$, where ${\mathsf{N}}_c$ is the number of independent pitch vectors that arise in the homogeneous and modulated ordered phases. We carry out a detailed analysis of the quantum critical behavior, discussing the mechanism leading to the phase transitions. We also discuss a proper characterization of all the gapless phases as well as the nature of the Goldstone excitations. We study the behavior of the correlation functions and identify regions in the phase diagram where the system exhibits generalized symmetries such as polynomial shift symmetry. This type of symmetry plays an important role in the so-called fractonic phase, which is an exotic form of matter recently discovered.

• Received 25 May 2021
• Accepted 29 July 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.104.034131