Magnetic Phase Diagram of the Ferromagnetically Stacked Triangular XY Antiferromagnet: A Finite-Size Scaling Study

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to map the magnetic phase diagram of a stacked triangular XY antiferromagnet, revealing critical behavior and the limitations of mean-field approaches, and proposing a Landau free-energy model.

Contribution

It provides a detailed finite-size scaling analysis of the phase transitions and demonstrates the effectiveness of a Landau-type model over molecular-field theory.

Findings

Finite-size scaling results align with symmetry-based expectations.

Molecular-field theory fails to capture the phase diagram structure.

Landau free-energy model reproduces essential features of the phase diagram.

Abstract

Histogram Monte-Carlo simulation results are presented for the magnetic-field -- temperature phase diagram of the XY model on a stacked triangular lattice with antiferromagnetic intraplane and ferromagnetic interplane interactions. Finite-size scaling results at the various transition boundaries are consistent with expectations based on symmetry arguments. Although a molecular-field treatment of the Hamiltonian fails to reproduce the correct structure for the phase diagram, it is demonstrated that a phenomenological Landau-type free-energy model contains all the esstential features. These results serve to complement and extend our earlier work [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 48}, 3840 (1993)].