Exact treatment of magnetism-driven ferroelectricity in the one-dimensional compass model

We consider a class of one-dimensional compass models with antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya exchange interaction in an external magnetic field. Based on the exact solution derived by means of Jordan-Wigner transformation, we study the excitation gap, spin correlations, ground-state degeneracy, and critical properties at phase transitions. The phase diagram at finite electric and magnetic field consists of three phases: ferromagnetic, canted antiferromagnetic, and chiral. Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction induces an electrical polarization in the ground state of the chiral phase, where the nonlocal string order and special features of entanglement spectra arise, while strong chiral correlations emerge at finite temperature in the other phases and are controlled by a gap between the nonchiral ground state and the chiral excitations. We further show that the magnetoelectric effects in all phases disappear above a typical temperature corresponding to the total bandwidth of the effective fermionic model. To this end we explore the entropy, specific heat, magnetization, electric polarization, and the magnetoelectric tensor at finite temperature. We identify rather peculiar specific-heat and polarization behavior of the compass model which follows from highly frustrated interactions.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, Slight change comparing with the published versio

Contact angle of spherical drops inside a smooth and homogeneous cylindrical capillary with hemispherical head

To investigate the wettability of spherical drops in a smooth and homogeneous cylindrical capillary with hemispherical head, based on Gibbs’s method of dividing surface and Rusanov’s concept of dividing line, the contact angle of spherical droplets has been successfully derived considering the effects of the line tension. Additionally, under the condition of ignoring the line tension, the equation describing the contact angle is simplified as the classical Young equation