Proposal of a spin-one chain model with competing dimer and trimer interactions

Abstract

A new kind of spin-1 chain Hamiltonian consisting of competing dimer and trimer projection operators is proposed. As the relative strengths and signs of the interactions are varied, the model exhibits a number of different phases including the gapped dimer phase and the gapless trimer phase with critical correlations described by a conformal field theory with central charge $c=2$. A symmetry-protected topological phase also exists in this model, even though the microscopic interactions are not the simple adiabatic extensions of the well-known Heisenberg and the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki model and contains both two- and three-particle permutations. A fourth phase is characterized by macroscopically degenerate ground states. While bearing almost a one-to-one resemblance to the phase diagram of the bilinear-biquadratic spin-1 chain Hamiltonian, our model is rooted on very different physical origin, namely the two competing tendencies of spin-1 particles to form singlets through either dimer or trimer formation.

13 pages, 8 figure, appendix

References in corpus (6)

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Excitations in the spin-1 trimer chain compound CaNi3P4O14: gapped dispersive spinwaves to gapless magnetic excitations
• Phase transition of an SU(3) symmetric spin-1 chain