Friday, September 7, 2012

1209.1381 (Sophia R. Sklan et al.)

Nonplanar ground states of the classical antiferromagnet on an
octahedral lattice
   [PDF]

Sophia R. Sklan, Christopher L. Henley
We consider methods to identify the classical ground state for an exchange-coupled Heisenberg antiferromagnet on a non-Bravais lattice with interactions $J_{ij}$ to several neighbor distances. Here we apply this to the unusual "octahedral" lattice in which spins sit on the edge midpoints of a simple cubic lattice. Our approach is informed by the eigenvectors of $J_{ij}$ with largest eigenvalues. We discovered two families of non-coplanar states: (i) two kinds of commensurate state with cubic symmetry, each having twelve sublattices with spins pointing in (1,1,0) directions in spin space (modulo a global rotation); (ii) varieties of incommensurate conic spiral. The latter family is addressed by projecting the three-dimensional lattice to a one-dimensional chain, with a basis of two (or more) sites per unit cell.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.1381

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