Spin nematic ground state of the triangular lattice S=1 biquadratic model

Abstract

Motivated by the spate of recent experimental and theoretical interest in Mott insulating S=1 triangular lattice magnets, we consider a model S=1 Hamiltonian on a triangular lattice interacting with rotationally symmetric biquadratic interactions. We show that the partition function of this model can be expressed in terms of configurations of three colors of tightly-packed, closed loops with {\em non-negative} weights, which allows for efficient quantum Monte Carlo sampling on large lattices. We find the ground state has spin nematic order, i.e. it spontaneously breaks spin rotation symmetry but preserves time reversal symmetry. We present accurate results for the parameters of the low energy field theory, as well as finite-temperature thermodynamic functions.

References in corpus (5)

• The quadrupolar phases of the S=1 bilinear-biquadratic Heisenberg model on the triangular lattice
• Bridging lattice-scale physics and continuum field theory with quantum Monte Carlo simulations
• Possible ferro-spin nematic order in NiGa2S4
• Quadrupolar correlations and spin freezing in S = 1 triangular lattice antiferromagnets
• Quantum spin nematics, dimerization, and deconfined criticality in quasi-one dimensional spin-1 magnets