We analytically study the boundary between the Haldane phase and the large- D (LD) phase of a ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic alternating Heisenberg chain with on-site easy-plane anisotropy. We transform this model into a generalized alternating antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model with anisotropy. In the transformed model, the competition between the transverse and longitudinal alternations results in the Haldane-LD transition. Our Haldane-LD boundary calculated through the bosonization method agrees very well with that of Hida [Phys. Rev. B 46 (1992) 8268], determined by the numerical method.
The ground-state phase diagram of a spin-
21 XXZ chain with competing ferromagnetic nearest-neighbor (
J1<0) and antiferromagnetic second-neighbor (
J2>0) exchange couplings is studied by means of the infinite time evolving block decimation algorithm and effective field theories. For the SU(2)-symmetric (Heisenberg) case, we show that the nonmagnetic phase in the range $\ensuremath{-}4<{J}_{1}/{J}_{2}<0$ has a small but finite ferromagnetic dimer order. We argue that this spontaneous dimer order is associated with effective spin-1 degrees of freedom on dimerized bonds, which collectively form a valence bond solid state as in the spin-1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain (the Haldane spin chain). We thus call this phase the Haldane dimer phase. With easy-plane anisotropy, the model exhibits a variety of phases including the vector chiral phase with gapless excitations and the even-parity dimer and N\'eel phases with gapped excitations, in addition to the Haldane dimer phase. Furthermore, we show the existence of gapped phases with coexisting orders in narrow regions that intervene between the gapless chiral phase and any one of Haldane dimer, even-parity dimer, and N\'eel phases. Possible implications for quasi-one-dimensional edge-sharing cuprates are discussed.
We study the ground-state phase diagram of a one-dimensional spin-
21 easy-plane XXZ model with a ferromagnetic nearest-neighbor (NN) coupling
J1 and a competing next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) antiferromagnetic coupling
J2 in the parameter range
0<J2/∣J1∣<0.4. When ${J}_{2}/|{J}_{1}|\ensuremath{\lesssim}1/4$, the model is in a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid phase which is adiabatically connected to the critical phase of the XXZ model of
J2=0. On the basis of the effective (sine-Gordon) theory and numerical analyses of low-lying energy levels of finite-size systems, we show that the NNN coupling induces phase transitions from the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid to gapped phases with either N\'eel or dimer order. Interestingly, these two types of ordered phases appear alternately as the easy-plane anisotropy is changed toward the isotropic limit. The appearance of the antiferromagnetic (N\'eel) order in this model is remarkable, as it is strongly unfavored by both the easy-plane ferromagnetic NN coupling and the antiferromagnetic NNN coupling in the classical-spin picture. We argue that emergent trimer degrees of freedom play a crucial role in the formation of the N\'eel order.