Planar pyrochlore: a strong-coupling analysis

Recent investigations of the two-dimensional spin-1/2 checkerboard lattice favor a valence bond crystal with long range quadrumer order [J.-B. Fouet et al., preprint cond-mat/0108070]. Starting from the limit of isolated quadrumers, we perform a complementary analysis of the evolution of the spectrum as a function of the inter quadrumer coupling j using both, exact diagonalization (ED) and series expansion (SE) by continuous unitary transformation. We compute (i) the ground state energy, (ii) the elementary triplet excitations, (iii) singlet excitations on finite systems and find very good agreement between SE and ED. In the thermodynamic limit we find a ground state energy substantially lower than documented in the literature. The elementary triplet excitation is shown to be gapped and almost dispersionless, whereas the singlet sector contains strongly dispersive modes. Evidence is presented for the low energy singlet excitations in the spin gap in the vicinity of j=1 to result from a large downward renormalization of local high-energy states.Comment: 4 pages REVTeX4 including 3 figures: published version (minor changes

Finite temperature properties of the two-dimensional SU(2) Kondo-necklace

We analyse several thermodynamic properties of the two-dimensional Kondo necklace using finite-temperature stochastic series expansion. In agreement with previous zero-temperature findings the model is shown to exhibit a quantum critical point (QCP), separating an antiferromagnetic from a paramagnetic dimerized state at a critical Kondo exchange-coupling strength $J_{c}\approx 1.4$. We evaluate the temperature dependent uniform and staggered structure factors as well as the uniform and staggered susceptibilities and the local 'impurity' susceptibility close to the QCP as well as in the ordered and quantum disordered phase. The crossover between the classical, renormalized classical, and quantum critical regime is analyzed as a function of temperature and Kondo coupling.Comment: 4.2 pages, 6 figure