Ground-state phase diagram of a spin-<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mfrac><mml:mn>1</mml:mn><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mfrac></mml:math> frustrated XXZ ladder
Takuhiro Ogino, Ryui Kaneko, Satoshi Morita, Shunsuke Furukawa
Abstract
We study the ground-state phase diagram of a spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ frustrated XXZ ladder, in which two antiferromagnetic chains are coupled by competing rung and diagonal interactions, ${J}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$ and ${J}_{\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}}$. Previous studies on the isotropic model have revealed that a fluctuation-induced effective dimer attraction between the legs stabilizes the columnar dimer (CD) phase in the highly frustrated regime ${J}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}\ensuremath{\approx}2{J}_{\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}}$, especially for ferromagnetic ${J}_{\ensuremath{\perp},\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}}<0$. By means of effective field theory and numerical analyses, we extend this analysis to the XXZ model, and we obtain a rich phase diagram. The diagram includes four gapped featureless phases with no symmetry breaking: the rung singlet (RS) and Haldane phases as well as their twisted variants, the RS* and Haldane* phases, which are all distinct in the presence of certain symmetries. Significantly, the Haldane-CD transition point in the isotropic model turns out to be a crossing point of two transition lines in the XXZ model, and the stripe N\'eel and RS* phases appear between these lines. This indicates a nontrivial interplay between the effective dimer attraction and the exchange anisotropy. In the easy-plane regime, the four featureless phases and two critical phases are found to compete in a complex manner depending on the signs of ${J}_{\ensuremath{\perp},\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}}$.