Properties of highly frustrated magnetic molecules studied by the finite-temperature Lanczos method

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the finite-temperature Lanczos method in studying the thermal magnetic properties of large, highly frustrated magnetic molecules, including the icosidodecahedron with antiferromagnetic spins.

Contribution

It introduces and validates the finite-temperature Lanczos method for analyzing large Hilbert spaces in frustrated magnetic molecules, enabling new insights into their thermal quantum features.

Findings

The method accurately reproduces results for exactly solvable systems.

It reveals temperature-dependent behavior of quantum features like magnetization plateaus.

Applied to a large magnetic molecule, it shows how quantum properties evolve with temperature.

Abstract

The very interesting magnetic properties of frustrated magnetic molecules are often hardly accessible due to the prohibitive size of the related Hilbert spaces. The finite-temperature Lanczos method is able to treat spin systems for Hilbert space sizes up to 10^9. Here we first demonstrate for exactly solvable systems that the method is indeed accurate. Then we discuss the thermal properties of one of the biggest magnetic molecules synthesized to date, the icosidodecahedron with antiferromagnetically coupled spins of s=1/2. We show how genuine quantum features such as the magnetization plateau behave as a function of temperature.