Theory of liquid film growth and wetting instabilities on graphene

We investigate wetting phenomena near graphene within the Dzyaloshinskii-Lifshitz-Pitaevskii theory for light gases composed of hydrogen, helium and nitrogen in three different geometries where graphene is either affixed to an insulating substrate, submerged or suspended. We find that the presence of graphene has a significant effect in all configurations. In a suspended geometry where graphene is able to wet on only one side, liquid film growth becomes arrested at a critical thickness which may trigger surface instabilities and pattern formation analogous to spinodal dewetting. These phenomena are also universally present in other two-dimensional materials.Comment: 13 pages, includes expanded supplemental material with doping dependenc

Single hole dynamics in dimerized spin liquids

The dynamics of a single hole in quantum antiferromagnets is influenced by magnetic fluctuations. In the present work we consider two situations. The first one corresponds to a single hole in the two leg t-J spin ladder. In this case the wave function renormalization is relatively small and the quasiparticle residue of the S=1/2 state remains close to unity. However at large t/J there are higher spin (S=3/2,5/2,..) bound states of the hole with the magnetic excitations, and therefore there is a crossover from quasiparticles with S=1/2 to quasiparticles with higher spin. The second situation corresponds to a single hole in two coupled antiferromagnetic planes very close to the point of antiferromagnetic instability. In this case the hole wave function renormalization is very strong and the quasiparticle residue vanishes at the point of instability.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Bound states of magnons in the S=1/2 quantum spin ladder

We study the excitation spectrum of the two-leg antiferromagnetic S=1/2 Heisenberg ladder. Our approach is based on the description of the excitations as triplets above a strong-coupling singlet ground state. The quasiparticle spectrum is calculated by treating the excitations as a dilute Bose gas with infinite on-site repulsion. We find singlet (S=0) and triplet (S=1) two-particle bound states of the elementary triplets. We argue that bound states generally exist in any dimerized quantum spin model.Comment: 4 REVTeX pages, 4 Postscript figure

Low-energy singlet and triplet excitations in the spin-liquid phase of the two-dimensional J1-J2 model

We analyze the stability of the spontaneously dimerized spin-liquid phase of the frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet - the J1-J2 model. The lowest triplet excitation, corresponding to breaking of a singlet bond, is found to be stable in the region 0.38 < J2/J1 < 0.62. In addition we find a stable low-energy collective singlet mode, which is closely related to the spontaneous violation of the discrete symmetry. Both modes are gapped in the quantum disordered phase and become gapless at the transition point to the Neel ordered phase (J2/J1=0.38). The spontaneous dimerization vanishes at the transition and we argue that the disappearance of dimer order is related to the vanishing of the singlet gap. We also present exact diagonalization data on a small (4x4) cluster which indeed show a structure of the spectrum, consistent with that of a system with a four-fold degenerate (spontaneously dimerized) ground state.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, small changes, published versio

Critical Dynamics of Singlet Excitations in a Frustrated Spin System

We construct and analyze a two-dimensional frustrated quantum spin model with plaquette order, in which the low-energy dynamics is controlled by spin singlets. At a critical value of frustration the singlet spectrum becomes gapless, indicating a quantum transition to a phase with dimer order. This T=0 transition belongs to the 3D Ising universality class, while at finite temperature a 2D Ising critical line separates the plaquette and dimerized phases. The magnetic susceptibility has an activated form throughout the phase diagram, whereas the specific heat exhibits a rich structure and a power law dependence on temperature at the quantum critical point. We argue that the novel quantum critical behavior associated with singlet criticality discussed in this work can be relevant to a wide class of quantum spin systems, such as antiferromagnets on Kagome and pyrochlore lattices, where the low-energy excitations are known to be spin singlets, as well as to the CAVO lattice and several recently discovered strongly frustrated square-lattice antiferromagnets.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, additional discussion and figure added, to appear in Phys. Rev.

New quantum phase transitions in the two-dimensional J1-J2 model

We analyze the phase diagram of the frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet, the J1-J2 model, in two dimensions. Two quantum phase transitions in the model are already known: the second order transition from the Neel state to the spin liquid state at (J_2/J_1)_{c2}=0.38, and the first order transition from the spin liquid state to the collinear state at (J_2/J_1)_{c4}=0.60. We have found evidence for two new second order phase transitions: the transition from the spin columnar dimerized state to the state with plaquette type modulation at (J_2/J_1)_{c3}=0.50(2), and the transition from the simple Neel state to the Neel state with spin columnar dimerization at (J_2/J_1)_{c1}=0.34(4). We also present an independent calculation of (J_2/J_1)_{c2}=0.38 using a new approach.Comment: 3 pages, 5 figures; added referenc

Excitation spectrum and ground state properties of the S=1/2 Heisenberg ladder with staggered dimerization

We have studied the excitation spectrum of the $S=1/2$ quantum spin ladder with staggered dimerization by dimer series expansions, diagrammatic analysis of an effective interacting Bose gas of local triplets, and exact diagonalization of small clusters. We find that the model has two massive phases, with predominant inter-chain (rung) or intra-chain correlations. The transition from the rung dimer into the intra-chain dimer phase is characterized by softening of the triplet spectrum at $k=\pi$. The excitation spectrum as well as the spin correlations away from and close to the critical line are calculated. The location of the phase boundary is also determined.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure