Nonordinary criticality at the edges of planar spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnets

Abstract

Dangling edge spins of dimerized two-dimensional spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnets are shown to exhibit nonordinary quantum critical correlations, akin to the scaling behavior observed in recently explored spin-1/2 systems. Based on large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we observe remarkable similarities between these two cases, and also examine the crossover to the fundamentally distinct behavior in the one-dimensional limit of strongly coupled edge spins. We complement our numerical analysis by a cluster mean-field theory that encompasses the qualitatively similar behavior for the spin-1 and the spin-1/2 case, and its dependence on the spatial edge spin configuration in a generic way.

11 pages, 12 figures