Ground state of a spin-1/2 Heisenberg-Ising two-leg ladder with XYZ intra-rung coupling

The quantum spin-1/2 two-leg ladder with an anisotropic XYZ Heisenberg intra-rung interaction and Ising inter-rung interactions is treated by means of a rigorous approach based on the unitary transformation. The particular case of the considered model with X-X intra-rung interaction resembles a quantum compass ladder with additional frustrating diagonal Ising interactions. Using an appropriately chosen unitary transformation, the model under investigation may be reduced to a transverse Ising chain with composite spins, and one may subsequently find the ground state quite rigorously. We obtain a ground-state phase diagram and analyze the interplay of the competition between several factors: the XYZ anisotropy in the Heisenberg intra-rung coupling, the Ising interaction along the legs, and the frustrating diagonal Ising interaction. The investigated model shows extraordinarily diverse ground-state phase diagrams including several unusual quantum ordered phases, two different disordered quantum paramagnetic phases, as well as discontinuous or continuous quantum phase transitions between those phases.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Low-temperature thermodynamics of spin-1/2 orthogonal-dimer chain with Ising and Heisenberg interactions

We consider an exactly solvable version of the quantum spin-1/2 orthogonal-dimer chain with the Heisenberg intra-dimer and Ising inter-dimer couplings. The investigated quantum spin system exhibits at zero temperature fractional plateaux at 1/4 and 1/2 of the saturation magnetization and it has a highly degenerate ground state at critical fields where the magnetization jumps. We study the field dependence of the specific heat at low temperature. The lattice-gas description is formulated in a vicinity of critical fields to explain the low-temperature behaviour of specific heat.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, contribution to proceedings of CSMAG'13 conferenc

Jordan-Wigner approach to the frustrated spin one-half XXZ chain

The Jordan-Wigner transformation is applied to study the ground state properties and dimerization transition in the $J_1-J_2$ $XXZ$ chain. We consider different solutions of the mean-field approximation for the transformed Hamiltonian. Ground state energy and the static structure factor are compared with complementary exact diagonalization and good agreement is found near the limit of the Majumdar-Ghosh model. Furthermore, the ground state phase diagram is discussed within the mean-field theory. In particular, we show that an incommensurate ground state is absent for large $J_2$ in a fully self-consistent mean-field analysis.Comment: final version to appear in Eur. Phys. J. B; 5 pages including 4 figures; some small extensions including additional reference