Global phase diagram of the spin-1 antiferromagnet with uniaxial anisotropy on the kagome lattice

TL;DR

This paper maps the complex phase diagram of a spin-1 antiferromagnetic model on the kagome lattice, revealing multiple phases and transitions, including novel and potentially experimentally accessible states.

Contribution

It provides a unified framework for understanding all known phases and their transitions in the spin-1 kagome antiferromagnet with uniaxial anisotropy.

Findings

Identification of six distinct phases including photon, plaquette, superfluid, nematic, and dimer resonating phases.

Discovery of a potential unconventional second-order transition between nematic and plaquette phases.

Prediction of a supersolid phase under magnetic field conditions.

Abstract

The phase diagram of the XXZ spin-1 quantum magnet on the kagome lattice is studied for all cases where the $J_z$ coupling is antiferromagnetic. In the zero magnetic field case, the six previously introduced phases, found using various methods, are: the nondegenerate gapped photon phase which breaks no space symmetry or spin symmetry; the six-fold degenerate phase with plaquette order, which breaks both time reversal symmetry and translational symmetry; the "superfluid" (ferromagnetic) phase with an in-plane global U(1) symmetry broken, when $J_{xy} < 0$; the $\sqrt{3}\times\sqrt{3}$ order when $J_{xy} > 0$; the nematic phase when $D < 0$ and large; and a phase with resonating dimers on each hexagon. We obtain all of these phases and partial information about their quantum phase transitions in a single framework by studying condensation of defects in the six-fold plaquette phases. The transition between nematic phase and the six-fold degenerate plaquette phase is potentially an unconventional second-order critical point. In the case of a nonzero magnetic field along $\hat{z}$, another ordered phase with translation symmetry broken is opened up in the nematic phase. Due to the breaking of time-reversal symmetry by the field, a supersolid phase emerges between the six-fold plaquette order and the superfluid phase. This phase diagram might be accessible in nickel compounds, BF$_4$ salts, or optical lattices of atoms with three degenerate states on every site.