We explore the phase diagram and the low-energy physics of three Heisenberg antiferromagnets which, like the kagome lattice, are networks of corner-sharing triangles but contain two sets of inequivalent short-distance resonance loops. We use a combination of exact diagonalization, analytical strong-coupling theories, and resonating valence bond approaches, and scan through the ratio of the two inequivalent exchange couplings. In one limit, the lattices effectively become bipartite, while at the opposite limit heavily frustrated nets emerge. In between, competing tunneling processes result in short-ranged spin correlations, a manifold of low-lying singlets (which can be understood as localized bound states of magnetic excitations), and the stabilization of valence bond crystals with resonating building blocks.
Over the last decade, the interest in the spin-
1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet (HAF) on the square kagome (also called shuriken) lattice has been growing as a model system of quantum magnetism with a quantum paramagnetic ground state, flat-band physics near the saturation field, and quantum scars. A further motivation to study this model comes from the recent discovery of a gapless spin liquid in the square kagome magnet
KCu6AlBiO4(SO4)5Cl [M. Fujihala et al., Nat. Commun. 11, 3429 (2020)]. Here, we present large-scale numerical investigations of the specific heat
C(T), the entropy
S(T), as well as the susceptibility $\ensuremath{\chi}(T)$ by means of the finite-temperature Lanczos method for system sizes of
N=18,24,30,36,42,48, and
N=54. We find that the specific heat exhibits a low-temperature shoulder below the major maximum which can be attributed to low-lying singlet excitations filling the singlet-triplet gap, which is significantly larger than the singlet-singlet gap. This observation is further supported by the behavior of the entropy
S(T), where a change in curvature is present just at about
T/J=0.2, the same temperature where the shoulder in
C sets in. For the susceptibility the low-lying singlet excitations are irrelevant, and the singlet-triplet gap leads to an exponentially activated low-temperature behavior. The maximum in $\ensuremath{\chi}(T)$ is found at a pretty low temperature
Tmax/J=0.146 (for
N=42) compared to
Tmax/J=0.935 for the unfrustrated square-lattice HAF signaling the crucial role of frustration also for the susceptibility. We find a striking similarity of our square kagome data with the corresponding ones for the kagome HAF down to very low
T. The magnetization process featuring plateaus and jumps and the field dependence of the specific heat that exhibits characteristic peculiarities attributed to the existence of a flat one-magnon band are discussed as well.
We study a Heisenberg antiferromagnet (AF) on a one-dimensional strip composed of two rows of corner sharing triangular plaquettes. The geometry of this ladder-like lattice naturally allows for two different exchange couplings, one between pairs of spins on the outer legs (J) and a different one between the spins on the axis and their nearest neighbors on the legs ${(J}^{\ensuremath{'}}).$ For ${J/J}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}0.5$ the model is a ferrimagnet. Our main interest is in the region ${J/J}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}0.5,$ where the classical ground state of this system shows the same macroscopic degeneracy as the classical ground state of the antiferromagnet on the kagom\'e lattice. To explore to which extent this similarity between the classical ground states of these two models carries over to their quantum states we have applied exact diagonalization techniques and density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) methods to our model. Exact diagonalization is restricted to system sizes of up to
N=30 sites. For ${J/J}^{\ensuremath{'}}=1,$ the results obtained by this technique, low-energy spectra, correlation functions and the specific heat, agree qualitatively with the results obtained for finite samples of the kagom\'e AF. As in the case of the kagom\'e AF, these finite size results suggest that our model is a spin liquid with a gap between the ground state and the lowest spin excitation. However, extrapolations from DMRG data for strips of up to
N=120 sites point towards a vanishing spin gap in a wide range of couplings, $0.5\ensuremath{\lesssim}{J/J}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}1.25,$ so that contrary to the above conjecture, our one-dimensional model may in fact be critical in this parameter range. Moreover, our DMRG data indicate that the model undergoes a transition to a gapped state as the ratio ${J/J}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ increases through the value ${J/J}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{\simeq}1.25.$ In the vicinity of the transition point, a high density of low-lying singlets develops in the spin gap.
We study the ground-state phase diagram of the spin-
1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the square-kagome lattice using infinite projected entangled-pair states (iPEPS). By systematically varying the ratio of exchange couplings on triangular and square plaquettes, we establish a complete quantum phase diagram in the thermodynamic limit. In the intermediate-coupling regime, we identify four distinct nonmagnetic phases that are unambiguously characterized as valence-bond crystals (VBCs) by their symmetry-inequivalent patterns of strong and weak spin-spin correlations. These include a plaquette crossed-dimer VBC, a loop-six VBC stabilized around the isotropic point, a generalized pinwheel VBC with reduced rotational symmetry, and a decorated loop-six VBC proximate to ferrimagnetic order. We determine the phase boundaries using a combination of bond-resolved correlation functions, entanglement entropy, and magnetization. For transitions not accompanied by sharp entanglement signatures, we extract the spin gap from finite-field simulations, allowing us to distinguish gapped and gapless VBC phases. At larger coupling ratios, the system undergoes transitions into imperfect and perfect ferrimagnetic states. Our results resolve long-standing ambiguities in the square-kagome Heisenberg model and provide a quantitatively reliable reference for future theoretical and experimental studies of frustrated quantum magnets.
This paper is concerned with physics of the low-energy singlet excitations found to exist below the spin gap in numerical studies of the Kagome lattice quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Insight into the nature of these excitations is obtained by exploiting an approximate mapping to a fully frustrated transverse-field Ising model on the dual dice lattice. This Ising model is shown to possess at least two phases---an ordered phase that also breaks translational symmetry with a large unit cell, and a paramagnetic phase. The former is argued to be a likely candidate for the ground state of the original Kagome magnet which thereby exhibits a specific pattern of dimer ordering with a large unit cell. Comparisons with available numerical results are made.
We investigate the ground-state properties of a spin-1 kagome antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model using tensor-network (TN) methods. We obtain the energy per site ${e}_{0}=\ensuremath{-}1.410\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}90(2)$, with
D∗=8 multiplets retained (i.e., a bond dimension of
D=24), and ${e}_{0}=\ensuremath{-}1.4116(4)$ from large-
D extrapolation, by accurate TN calculations directly in the thermodynamic limit. The symmetry between the two kinds of triangles is spontaneously broken, with a relative energy difference of $\ensuremath{\delta}\ensuremath{\approx}19%$, i.e, there is a trimerization (simplex) valence-bond order in the ground state. The spin-spin, dimer-dimer, and chirality-chirality correlation functions are found to decay exponentially with a rather short correlation length, showing that the ground state is gapped. We thus identify the ground state to be a simplex valence-bond crystal. We also discuss the spin-1 bilinear-biquadratic Heisenberg model on a kagome lattice, and determine its ground-state phase diagram. Moreover, we implement non-Abelian symmetries, here spin SU(2), in the TN algorithm, which improves the efficiency greatly and provides insight into the tensor structures.