Phases of a triangular-lattice antiferromagnet near saturation.

Phys Rev Lett

Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.

Published: August 2014

We consider 2D Heisenberg antiferromagnets on a triangular lattice with spatially anisotropic interactions in a high magnetic field close to the saturation. We show that this system possesses a rich phase diagram in a field or anisotropy plane due to competition between classical and quantum orders: an incommensurate noncoplanar spiral state, which is favored classically, and a commensurate coplanar state, which is stabilized by quantum fluctuations. We show that the transformation between these two states is highly nontrivial and involves two intermediate phases--the phase with coplanar incommensurate spin order and the one with noncoplanar double-Q spiral order. The transition between the two coplanar states is of commensurate-incommensurate type, not accompanied by softening of spin-wave excitations. We show that a different sequence of transitions holds in triangular antiferromagnets with exchange anisotropy, such as Ba(3)CoSb(2)O(9).

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.087204DOI Listing

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