Dimensional reduction in quantum spin-1/2 system on a 1/7-depleted triangular lattice

TL;DR

This study investigates a quantum spin-1/2 antiferromagnet on a 1/7-depleted triangular lattice, revealing spontaneous dimensional reduction and stripe order driven by quantum fluctuations in an otherwise isotropic 2D system.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel spontaneous dimensional reduction in a frustrated quantum magnet with uniform interactions, leading to stripe order and 1D magnon propagation.

Findings

Ground state exhibits stripe Neel order.

Magnetic susceptibility follows 1D XXZ model behavior.

Magnons split into spinons propagating along stripes.

Abstract

We study the magnetism of a quantum spin-1/2 antiferromagnet on a maple-leaf lattice which is obtained by regularly depleting 1/7 of the sites of a triangular lattice. Although the interactions are set to be spatially uniform, the ground state shows a stripe Neel order and the temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibility follows that of the one-dimensional XXZ model with a finite spin gap. We examine the nature of frustration by mapping the low energy degenerate manifold of states to the fully packed loop-string model on a dual cluster-depleted honeycomb lattice, finding that the order-by-disorder due to quantum fluctuation characteristic of highly frustrated magnets is responsible for the emergent stripes. The excited magnons split into two spinons and propagate in the one-dimensional direction along the stripe which is reminiscent of the XXZ or Ising model in one dimension. Unlike most of the previously studied dimensional reduction effects, our case is purely spontaneous as the interactions of the Hamiltonian retains a spatially isotropic two-dimensional structure.