The ground state of the ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic alternating spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain is studied with Ising-type anisotropy on the ferromagnetic bond. This model tends to the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain with on-site anisotropy in the limit of strong ferromagnetic bond. It is found that the Haldane-gap phase, the large-D phase, and the two types of N\'eel phases appear as the ground state of this model. The duality relations between these four phases are proved for several limiting cases. The string order parameter characterizing the large-D phase is introduced based on these duality relations. The ground-state phase diagram is determined by the numerical diagonalization of the finite-size system.
Botet and Jullien [Phys. Rev. B 27, 613 (1983)] have conducted a finite-chain scaling analysis on the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg-Ising chain. They claim that the ground-state properties are completely different from the case of spin
21. Using finite-size scaling techniques, they conclude that between the
XY gapless phase and the doublet-ground-state N\'eel phase, a new phase appears in an extended anisotropy range. This phase, which encompasses the isotropic Heisenberg model, is characterized by a nonmagnetic singlet ground state and a nonzero excitation-energy gap. We perform a similar finite-chain scaling analysis on the spin-
21 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg-Ising chain and obtain strikingly similar results. Since the spin-
41 system is known rigorously not to exhibit the type of behavior proposed by Botet and Jullien, their analysis is open to doubt. The possibility arises that a strong singularity at the Heisenberg point for spin 1 (similar to the essential singularity for spin
21) may be giving rise to misleading results. The
T=0 phase behavior of the spin-1 Heisenberg-Ising antiferromagnetic chain, therefore, remains in question and specific additional numerical studies are proposed to clarify the matter.
The location of the XY phase in the ground-state phase diagram of the spin-1/2 anisotropic ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic alternating Heisenberg chain is determined. This model reduces to the spin-1 XXZ chain if the ferromagnetic bond is infinitely strong. The phase boundary between the XY phase and the Haldane phase is determined from the analysis of the numerically obtained energy spectrum of finite-sized systems with the open boundary condition. Our results are consistent with the series-expansion results by Yamanaka et al . within their error bars. The boundary between the ferromagnetic phase and the XY phase is also determined by comparing the energy eigenvalues of these two phases.
The ground-state phase diagram of
S=2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chains with coexisting uniform and alternating single-site anisotropies is investigated by the numerical exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods. We find the Haldane, large-
D, Néel, period-doubled Néel, gapless spin fluid, quantized and partial ferrimagnetic phases. The Haldane phase is limited to the close neighborhood of the isotropic point. Within numerical accuracy, the transition from the gapless spin-fluid phase to the period-doubled Néel phase is a direct transition. Nevertheless, the presence of a narrow spin-gap phase between these two phases is suggested on the basis of the low-energy effective theory. The ferrimagnetic ground state is present in a wide parameter range. This suggests the realization of magnetized single-chain magnets with a uniform spin magnitude by controlling the environment of each magnetic ion without introducing ferromagnetic interactions.