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Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 117201 (2007) [4 pages]

Ising Phases of Heisenberg Ladders in a Magnetic Field

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Karlo Penc1, Jean-Baptiste Fouet2, Shin Miyahara3, Oleg Tchernyshyov4, and Frédéric Mila5
1Research Institute for Theoretical Solid State Physics and Optics, H-1525 Budapest, P.O.B. 49, Hungary
2Institut Romand de Recherche Numérique en Physique des Matériaux (IRRMA), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
3Department of Physics and Mathematics, Aoyama Gakuin University, Sagamihara 229-8558, Japan
4Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
5Institute of Theoretical Physics, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Received 27 February 2007; revised 8 June 2007; published 10 September 2007

We show that Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions can substantially modify the phase diagram of spin-1/2 Heisenberg ladders in a magnetic field provided they compete with exchange. For nonfrustrated ladders, they induce a local magnetization along the DM vector that turns the gapless intermediate phase into an Ising phase with broken translational symmetry, while for frustrated ladders, they extend the Ising order of the half-integer plateau to the surrounding gapless phases of the purely Heisenberg case. Implications for experimental ladder and dimer systems are discussed.

© 2007 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.117201
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.117201
PACS:
75.10.Jm
 
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