Ground-state and magnetization behavior of the frustrated spin-1/2 antisymmetric diamond chain

Abstract

The low-dimensional quantum spin systems have been extensively studied in the past three decades due to the novel ground states and rich magnetic behaviors,especially the quantum spin chain with diamond topology structure. Motivated by recent experimental success in Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2 compound,which is regarded as a model material of spin-1/2 diamond chain,researchers have paid a lot of attention to various variants of diamond spin chains.In this paper,we mainly examine the magnetic properties of an antisymmetric spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg diamond chain with the secondneighbor interaction between nodal spins.By using exact diagonalization and transfer-matrix methods,the ground-state phase diagram,magnetization behavior and macroscopic thermodynamics are exactly solved for the particular case that all magnetic bonds yield antiferromagnetic couplings,which usually shows the most interesting magnetic features closely related to a striking interplay between geometric frustration and quantum fluctuations.To clearly illustrate the effect of second-neighbor interaction item,we consider a highly frustrated situation that all Ising-Heisenberg bonds and Heisenberg bonds possess the same interaction strength.The calculation results indicate that the second-neighbor interaction item will enrich ground states and magnetization plateaus.A classical ferrimagnetic phase FRI1 corresponding to a novel two-thirds of intermediate plateau with translationally broken symmetry is introduced,manifesting itself as up-up-up-down-up-up spin configuration at a ground-state.In addition,there are other four distinct ground states which can be identified from the phase diagram,i.e.,one saturated paramagnetic phase SP,one classical ferrimagnetic phase FRI2,one quantum ferrimagnetic phase QFI and the unique quantum antiferromagnetic phase QAF.The classical phase FRI2 and quantum phase QFI both generate one-third of magnetization plateau.It is worth mentioning that all the values of these magnetization plateaus satisfy the Oshikawa-Yamanaka-Affleck condition.Besides,the results also have shown a rich variety of temperature dependence of total magnetization and specific heat.The magnetization displays the remarkable thermal-induced changes as the external field is sufficiently close to critical value where two or more than two different ground states coexist.At the critical field relevant to a coexistence of two different states,the total magnetization displays a monotonic decrease trend.The thermal dependence of zero-field specific heat displays relative complex variations for different second-neighbor interactions between nodal spins.At first,the specific heat presents only a single rounded Schottky-type maximum.Using the second-neighbor interaction,another sharp peak arises at low-temperature and is superimposed on this round maximum,and the specific heat exhibits a double-peak structure. On further strengthening,the low-temperature one keeps its height shifting towards high temperature,while the hightemperature round peak suffers great enhancement and moves in an opposite direction.Finally,the low temperature peak entirely merges with the Schottky-type peak at a certain value of second-neighbor interaction,and above this value, the specific curve recovers its single peak structure.The observed double-peak specific heat curves mainly originate from thermal excitations between the ground-state spin configuration QAF and the ones close enough in energy to the ground state.