No Arabic abstract
We discuss the ground-state degeneracy of spin-$1/2$ kagome-lattice quantum antiferromagnets on magnetization plateaus by employing two complementary methods: the adiabatic flux insertion in closed boundary conditions and a t Hooft anomaly argument on inherent symmetries in a quasi-one-dimensional limit. The flux insertion with a tilted boundary condition restricts the lower bound of the ground-state degeneracy on $1/9$, $1/3$, $5/9$, and $7/9$ magnetization plateaus under the $mathrm{U(1)}$ spin-rotation and the translation symmetries: $3$, $1$, $3$, and $3$, respectively. This result motivates us further to develop an anomaly interpretation of the $1/3$ plateau. Taking advantage of the insensitivity of anomalies to spatial anisotropies, we examine the existence of the unique gapped ground state on the $1/3$ plateau from a quasi-one-dimensional viewpoint. In the quasi-one-dimensional limit, kagome antiferromagnets are reduced to weakly coupled three-leg spin tubes. Here, we point out the following anomaly description of the $1/3$ plateau. While a simple $S=1/2$ three-leg spin tube cannot have the unique gapped ground state on the $1/3$ plateau because of an anomaly between a $mathbb Z_3times mathbb Z_3$ symmetry and the translation symmetry at the $1/3$ filling, the kagome antiferromagnet breaks explicitly one of the $mathbb Z_3$ symmetries related to a $mathbb Z_3$ cyclic transformation of spins in the unit cell. Hence the kagome antiferromagnet can have the unique gapped ground state on the $1/3$ plateau.
Motivated by a recent experiment on volborthite, a typical spin-$1/2$ antiferromagnet with a kagom{e} lattice structure, we study the magnetization process of a classical Heisenberg model on a spatially distorted kagom{e} lattice using the Monte Carlo (MC) method. We find a distortion-induced magnetization step at low temperatures and low magnetic fields. The magnitude of this step is given by $Delta m_z=left|1-alpharight|/3alpha$ at zero temperature, where $alpha$ denotes the spatial anisotropy in exchange constants. The magnetization step signals a first-order transition at low temperatures, between two phases distinguished by distinct and well-developed short-range spin correlations, one characterized by spin alignment of a local $120^{circ}$ structure with a $sqrt{3}timessqrt{3}$ period, and the other by a partially spin-flopped structure. We point out the relevance of our results to the unconventional steps observed in volborthite.
We investigate the properties in finite magnetic field of an extended anisotropic XXZ spin-1/2 model on the Kagome lattice, originally introduced by Balents, Fisher, and Girvin [Phys. Rev. B, 65, 224412 (2002)]. The magnetization curve displays plateaus at magnetization m=1/6 and 1/3 when the anisotropy is large. Using low-energy effective constrained models (quantum loop and quantum dimer models), we discuss the nature of the plateau phases, found to be crystals that break discrete rotation and/or translation symmetries. Large-scale quantum Monte-Carlo simulations were carried out in particular for the m=1/6 plateau. We first map out the phase diagram of the effective quantum loop model with an additional loop-loop interaction to find stripe order around the point relevant for the original model as well as a topological Z2 spin liquid. The existence of a stripe crystalline phase is further evidenced by measuring both standard structure factor and entanglement entropy of the original microscopic model.
Frustrated spin systems on Kagome lattices have long been considered to be a promising candidate for realizing exotic spin liquid phases. Recently, there has been a lot of renewed interest in these systems with the discovery of materials such as Volborthite and Herbertsmithite that have Kagome like structures. In the presence of an external magnetic field, these frustrated systems can give rise to magnetization plateaus of which the plateau at $m=frac{1}{3}$ is considered to be the most prominent. Here we study the problem of the antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 quantum XXZ Heisenberg model on a Kagome lattice by using a Jordan-Wigner transformation that maps the spins onto a problem of fermions coupled to a Chern-Simons gauge field. This mapping relies on being able to define a consistent Chern-Simons term on the lattice. Using a recently developed method to rigorously extend the Chern-Simons term to the frustrated Kagome lattice we can now formalize the Jordan-Wigner transformation on the Kagome lattice. We then discuss the possible phases that can arise at the mean-field level from this mapping and focus specifically on the case of $frac{1}{3}$-filling ($m=frac{1}{3}$ plateau) and analyze the effects of fluctuations in our theory. We show that in the regime of $XY$ anisotropy the ground state at the $1/3$ plateau is equivalent to a bosonic fractional quantum Hall Laughlin state with filling fraction $1/2$ and that at the $5/9$ plateau it is equivalent to the first bosonic Jain daughter state at filling fraction $2/3$.
Recent studies revealed that the electric multipole moments of insulators result in fractional electric charges localized to the hinges and corners of the sample. We here explore the magnetic analog of this relation. We show that a collinear antiferromagnet with spin $S$ defined on a $d$-dimensional cubic lattice features fractionally quantized magnetization $M_{text{c}}^z=S/2^d$ at the corners. We find that the quantization is robust even in the presence of gapless excitations originating from the spontaneous formation of the Neel order, although the localization length diverges, suggesting a power-law localization of the corner magnetization. When the spin rotational symmetry about the $z$ axis is explicitly broken, the corner magnetization is no longer sharply quantized. Even in this case, we numerically find that the deviation from the quantized value is negligibly small based on quantum Monte Carlo simulations.
We present thermodynamic and neutron data on Ni_3V_2O_8, a spin-1 system on a kagome staircase. The extreme degeneracy of the kagome antiferromagnet is lifted to produce two incommensurate phases at finite T - one amplitude modulated, the other helical - plus a commensurate canted antiferromagnet for T ->0. The H-T phase diagram is described by a model of competing first and second neighbor interactions with smaller anisotropic terms. Ni_3V_2O_8 thus provides an elegant example of order from sub leading interactions in a highly frustrated system