Effects of staggered Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions in a quasi-two-dimensional Shastry-Sutherland model

TL;DR

This study investigates how non-uniform Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions influence the magnetization and chiral phases in a quasi-two-dimensional Shastry-Sutherland quantum spin system using matrix product states.

Contribution

It reveals the effects of interdimer and intradimer DM interactions on magnetization plateaux and chiral phases, highlighting the role of non-uniform interactions in frustrated quantum magnets.

Findings

DM interactions modify magnetization plateaux

Intradimer DM smoothens magnetization curves

Interdimer DM induces chirality and new plateaux

Abstract

Frustrated quantum spin systems exhibit exotic physics induced by external magnetic field with anisotropic interactions. Here, we study the effect of non-uniform Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions on a quasi-two-dimensional Shastry-Sutherland lattice using a matrix product states (MPS) algorithm. We first recover the magnetization plateau structure present in this geometry and then we show that both interdimer and intradimer DM interactions significantly modify the plateaux. The non-number-conserving intradimer interaction smoothens the shape of the magnetization curve, while the number-conserving interdimer interaction induces different small plateaux, which are signatures of the finite size of the system. Interestingly, the interdimer DM interaction induces chirality in the system. We thus characterize these chiral phases with particular emphasis to their robustness against intradimer DM interactions.