Phase Structure of Anisotropic Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Model on Layered Triangular Lattice: Spiral State and Deconfined Spin Liquid

TL;DR

This study maps the phase diagram of a spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on layered anisotropic triangular lattices, revealing various magnetic states and a deconfined spin-liquid phase with gapless excitations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed phase diagram including a deconfined spin-liquid phase induced by an emergent U(1) gauge field, extending previous zero-temperature findings.

Findings

Identification of AF Néel, paramagnetic, and spiral states.

Discovery of a deconfined spin-liquid phase with gapless gauge bosons.

Crossover transition rather than a sharp phase change to the spin-liquid.

Abstract

In the present paper, we study spin-${1 \over 2}$ antiferromagnetic (AF) Heisenberg model on layered anisotropic triangular lattice and obtain its phase structure. We use the Schwinger bosons for representing spin operators and also coherent-state path integral for calculating physical quantities. Finite-temperature properties of the system are investigated by means of the numerical Monte-Carlo simulations. Detailed phase diagram of the system is obtained by calculating internal energy, specific heat, spin correlation functions, etc. There are AF N\'eel, paramagnetic and spiral states. Turning on plaquette term (i.e., the Maxwell term on a lattice) of an emergent U(1) gauge field that flips a pair of parallel spin-singlet bonds, we found that there appears a phase that is regarded as a deconfined spin-liquid state, though "transition" to this phase from the paramagnetic phase is not of second order but a crossover. In that phase, the emergent gauge boson is a physical gapless excitation coupled with spinons. These results support our previous study on AF Heisenberg model on a triangular lattice at vanishing temperature.