Magnetic Bose glass phases of coupled antiferromagnetic dimers with site dilution

TL;DR

This study numerically explores the phase diagram of site-diluted coupled dimer systems under magnetic fields, revealing an extended two-species Bose glass phase resulting from localized quasiparticles, with implications for quantum phase transitions.

Contribution

It uncovers the existence of a continuous two-species Bose glass phase in a 2D coupled dimer system, which was not accessible to mean-field methods, and characterizes the quantum phase transition with new universal exponents.

Findings

Identification of an extended Bose glass phase from localized quasiparticles.

Continuous connection between two distinct Bose glass phases.

Universal exponents characterize the Bose glass to magnetic order transition.

Abstract

We numerically investigate the phase diagram of two-dimensional site-diluted coupled dimer systems in an external magnetic field. We show that this phase diagram is characterized by the presence of an extended Bose glass, not accessible to mean-field approximation, and stemming from the localization of two distinct species of bosonic quasiparticles appearing in the ground state. On the one hand, non-magnetic impurities doped into the dimer-singlet phase of a weakly coupled dimer system are known to free up local magnetic moments. The deviations of these local moments from full polarization along the field can be mapped onto a gas of bosonic quasiparticles, which undergo condensation in zero and very weak magnetic fields, corresponding to transverse long-range antiferromagnetic order. An increasing magnetic field lowers the density of such quasiparticles to a critical value at which a quantum phase transition occurs, corresponding to the quasiparticle localization on clusters of local magnets (dimers, trimers, etc.) and to the onset of a Bose glass. Strong finite-size quantum fluctuations hinder further depletion of quasiparticles from such clusters, and thus lead to the appearance of pseudo-plateaus in the magnetization curve of the system. On the other hand, site dilution hinders the field-induced Bose-Einstein condensation of triplet quasiparticles on the intact dimers, and it introduces instead a Bose glass of triplets. A thorough numerical investigation of the phase diagram for a planar system of coupled dimers shows that the two above-mentioned Bose glass phases are continuously connected, and they overlap in a finite region of parameter space, thus featuring a two-species Bose glass. The quantum phase transition from Bose glass to magnetic order in two dimensions is marked by novel universal exponents.