We study the ground state and thermodynamic properties of the spin-half XXZ model, with an Ising interaction
Jz and a transverse exchange interaction
Jx, on a pyrochlore tube obtained by joining together elementary cubes in a one-dimensional array. Periodic boundary conditions in the transverse directions ensure that the bulk of the system consists of corner-sharing tetrahedra, with the same local geometry as the pyrochlore lattice. We use exact diagonalization, the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), and minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS) methods to study the system. When
Jz is antiferromagnetic (
Jz>0) and
Jx is ferromagnetic (
Jx<0), we find a transition from a spin liquid to an XY ferromagnet, which has power-law correlations at
T=0. For
Jz<0 and
Jx>0, spin-two excitations are found to have lower energy than spin-one at the transition away from the fully polarized state, showing evidence for incipient spin-nematic order. When both interactions are antiferromagnetic, we find a nondegenerate ground state with no broken symmetries and a robust energy gap. The low-energy spectra evolve smoothly from predominantly Ising to predominantly XY interactions. In the spin-liquid regime of small
∣Jx∣, we study the confinement of monopole-antimonopole pairs and find that the confinement length scale is larger for
Jx<0 than for
Jx>0, although both length scales are very short. These results are consistent with a local spin-liquid phase for the Heisenberg antiferromagnet with no broken symmetries.
We calculate the magnetic phase diagram of the spin- 1 / 2 nearest neighbor XXZ pyrochlore model using the pseudo-Majorana functional renormalization group in the temperature flow formalism. Our phase diagram as a function of temperature and coupling ratio, allowing both longitudinal and transverse couplings to be ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic, reveals a large nonmagnetic regime at low temperatures, which includes the quantum spin ice phase near the antiferromagnetic Ising model, as well as the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg and XY models. We are able to detect magnetic phase transitions via critical finite size scaling down to temperatures two orders of magnitude smaller than the spin interactions, demonstrating the remarkably good performance of our method upon approaching the ground state. Specifically, the low-temperature transition from the zero-flux quantum spin ice phase into the transverse ferromagnetic phase shows very good agreement with previous quantum Monte Carlo results. Comparing our findings with classical results, we identify a quantum order-by-disorder effect near the antiferromagnetic XY model. In magnetically disordered regimes, we find characteristic patterns of broadened pinch points in the spin structure factor and investigate their evolution when approaching magnetically ordered phases. We also compute linear responses to lattice symmetry breaking perturbations and identify a possible lattice nematic ground state of the antiferromagnetic XY model.
We calculate the magnetic phase diagram of the spin-
1/2 nearest neighbor XXZ pyrochlore model using the pseudo-Majorana functional renormalization group in the temperature flow formalism. Our phase diagram as a function of temperature and coupling ratio, allowing both longitudinal and transverse couplings to be ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic, reveals a large non-magnetic regime at low temperatures, which includes the quantum spin ice phase near the antiferromagnetic Ising model, as well as the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg and XY models. We are able to detect magnetic phase transitions via critical finite size scaling down to temperatures two orders of magnitude smaller than the spin interactions, demonstrating the remarkably good performance of our method upon approaching the ground state. Specifically, the low temperature transition from the zero-flux quantum spin ice phase into the transverse ferromagnetic phase shows very good agreement with previous quantum Monte Carlo results. Comparing our findings with classical results, we identify a quantum order-by-disorder effect near the antiferromagnetic XY model. In magnetically disordered regimes, we find characteristic patterns of broadened pinch points in the spin structure factor and investigate their evolution when approaching magnetically ordered phases. We also compute linear responses to lattice symmetry breaking perturbations and identify a possible lattice nematic ground state of the antiferromagnetic XY model.
We study an effective spin model derived perturbatively from a random transverse-field Ising model on the pyrochlore lattice. The model consists of spin configurations on the pyrochlore lattice, restricted to the spin-ice subspace, with spins interacting with random Ising exchange couplings as well as ring exchanges along the hexagons of the lattice. This model is studied by exact diagonalization up to
N=64 site systems. We calculate spin-glass correlation functions and local entanglement entropy
ST between spins in a single tetrahedron and the rest of the system. We find that the model undergoes two phase transitions. At weak randomness the model is in a quantum spin-ice phase where
ST=ln6. Increasing randomness, at low transverse fields, first leads to a frozen phase, with long-range spin-glass order and
ST=ln2 corresponding to the Cat states associated with Ising order. Further increase in randomness leads to a random resonating-hexagon phase with a frozen backbone of spins and a broad distribution of entanglement entropies. The implications of these studies for non-Kramers rare-earth pyrochlores are discussed.
We study the effect of quantum fluctuations by means of a transverse magnetic field (
Γ) on the antiferromagnetic
J1−J2 Ising model on the checkerboard lattice, the two dimensional version of pyrochlore lattice. A plaquette operator formalism has been implemented to bosonise the model, in which a single boson is associated to each eigenstate of a plaquette and the inter-plaquette interactions define an effective Hamiltonian. The excitations of a plaquette would represent an-harmonic fluctuations of the model, which lead not only to lower the excitation energy compared with a single-spin flip but also to lift the extensive degeneracy in favor of a plaquette ordered state, which breaks lattice rotational symmetry for
J2>J1 (the collinear phase). The bosonic excitation gap vanishes at the critical boundary to N\'{e}el (
J2J1) phases, respectively. At the homogeneous coupling (
J1=J2) a (canted) resonating plaquette state (RPS) is established from an-harmonic fluctuations, which lasts for low fields,
Γ/J1≲0.4, followed by a crossover to the fully polarized phase. We will show that our results predict an order-by-disorder as a results of transverse field at the critical point (
J2=0.5J1) of the antiferromagnetic
J1−J2 Ising square lattice.