Understanding the emergence of novel collective behaviors in strongly interacting systems lies at the heart of quantum many-body physics. Valuable insight comes from examining how few-body correlations manifest in many-body systems, embodying the “from few to many” philosophy. An intriguing example is the set of universal relations in ultracold atomic gases, which connect a wide range of observables to a single quantity known as the contact. In this Letter, we demonstrate that universal relations manifest in a distinct class of quantum many-body systems, long-range quantum spin chains, which belong to an alternative universality class. Using effective field theory and the operator product expansion, we establish connections between the asymptotic behavior of equal-time spin correlation functions, the dynamical structure factor, and the contact density. The theoretical predictions for equal-time correlators are explicitly verified through numerical simulations based on matrix product states. Our results could be readily tested in state-of-the-art trapped-ion systems.

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• Long-range interactions
• Trapped ions
• Quantum spin chains