Effect of perturbations on the kagome $S=1/2$ antiferromagnet at all temperatures

Abstract

The ground state of the $S=1/2$ kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet is now recognized as a spin liquid, but its precise nature remains unsettled, even if more and more clues point towards a gapless spin liquid. We use high temperature series expansions (HTSE) to extrapolate the specific heat $c_V(T)$ and the magnetic susceptibility $\ddot{I}‡(T)$ over the full temperature range, using an improved entropy method with a self-determination of the ground state energy per site $e_0$. Optimized algorithms give the HTSE coefficients up to unprecedented orders (20 in $1/T$) and as exact functions of the magnetic field. Three extrapolations are presented for different low-$T$ behaviors of $c_V$: exponential (for a gapped system), linear or quadratic (for two different types of gapless spin liquids). We study the effects of various perturbations to the Heisenberg Hamiltonian: Ising anisotropy, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, second and third neighbor interactions, and randomly distributed magnetic vacancies. We propose an experimental determination of $\ddot{I}‡(T=0)$, which could be non zero, from $c_V$ measurements under different magnetic fields.

Main article of 7 pages and 5 figures, Supplemental Material of 42 pages