594 research outputs found
Macroscopic quantum coherence in antiferromagnetic molecular magnets
The macroscopic quantum coherence in a biaxial antiferromagnetic molecular
magnet in the presence of magnetic field acting parallel to its hard anisotropy
axis is studied within the two-sublattice model. On the basis of instanton
technique in the spin-coherent-state path-integral representation, both the
rigorous Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin exponent and preexponential factor for the
ground-state tunnel splitting are obtained. We find that the quantum
fluctuations around the classical paths can not only induce a new quantum phase
previously reported by Chiolero and Loss (Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 169 (1998)), but
also have great influnence on the intensity of the ground-state tunnel
splitting. Those features clearly have no analogue in the ferromagnetic
molecular magnets. We suggest that they may be the universal behaviors in all
antiferromagnetic molecular magnets. The analytical results are complemented by
exact diagonalization calculation.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur
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