The peculiarities of the energy spectrum of the decorated mixed spin two-leg ladder system having three spin unit cells have been studied by the perturbation theory in the limit of dominant spin coupling in ladder rungs. It is shown, that despite the singlet ground state, this spin ladder may have an intermediate plateau in a low-temperature magnetization profile. The existence of a similar plateau was shown also in the case of some intermediate values of coupling parameters by means of exact diagonalization study of small ladder clusters and by the density-matrix renormalization group calculations. We also found that the Ising type of interactions in ladder rungs may lead to the disappearance of the above intermediate magnetization plateau for the corresponding isotropic spin ladder.
The experimental realization of various spin ladder systems has prompted their detailed theoretical investigations. Here we study the evolution of ground-state magnetization with an external magnetic field for two different antiferromagnetic systems: a three-legged spin-
1/2 ladder, and a two-legged spin-
1/2 ladder with an additional diagonal interaction. The finite system density-matrix renormalization-group method is employed for numerical studies of the three-chain system, and an effective low-energy Hamiltonian is used in the limit of strong interchain coupling to study the two- and three-chain systems. The three-chain system has a magnetization plateau at one-third of the saturation magnetization. The two-chain system has a plateau at zero magnetization due to a gap above the singlet ground state. It also has a plateau at half of the saturation magnetization for a certain range of values of the couplings. We study the regions of transitions between plateaus numerically and analytically, and find that they are described, at first order in a strong-coupling expansion, by an
XXZ spin-
1/2 chain in a magnetic field; the second-order terms give corrections to the
XXZ model. We also study numerically some low-temperature properties of the three-chain system, such as the magnetization, magnetic susceptibility and specific heat.