Physical review. B, Condensed matter
Néel order in a spatially anisotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnet
Y. Q. Wang, G. S. Tian, Hua Lin
Abstract
We investigate the existence of N\'eel long-range order in a spatially anisotropic antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model. As the anisotropical coupling ${J}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$ increases from $0$ to $1,$ the model interpolates between an infinite number of decoupled one-dimensional gapped spin chains and a two-dimensional gapless isotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnet. By applying a method based on reflection positivity [F. J. Dyson, E. H. Lieb, and B. Simon, J. Stat. Phys. $18,$ 335 (1978)], we determine the upper bound of the critical values of ${J}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}^{c}$ such that when ${J}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}>~{J}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}^{c},$ the ground state of this model has an antiferromagnetic long-range order. For the case of spin $S=1,$ our result confirms and strengthens previous results derived by numerical calculations on finite-size samples, while for other values of S, our results are new.