Physical review. B, Condensed matter
Ground-state phase diagram of a spin- 12 frustrated three-leg antiferromagnetic Heisenberg ladder
Xiaoqun Wang, Ningsheng Zhu, Changfeng Chen
Abstract
Using the density matrix renormalization group method we have studied the ground-state phase diagram of a spin-1/2 frustrated three-leg antiferromagnetic Heisenberg ladder, and identified two phases corresponding to the spin-3/2 chain and the standard spin ladder. Varying the diagonal coupling ${J}_{\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}}$ leads to a quantum phase transition from one ground state to the other, but does not alter the gapless nature of the excitation spectra. On the phase boundary, the degenerate ground states form a chiral spin liquid with a central charge $c=2.$ The critical value of ${J}_{\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}}$ is insensitive to the number of legs in the ladder, suggesting that a quantum phase transition may occur at ${J}_{\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}}=0.6$ for the isotropic spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the square lattice.