Diabolical points in magnetic molecules: An exactly solvable model

Abstract

The magnetic molecule Fe_8 has been observed to have a rich pattern of degeneracies in its magnetic spectrum as the static magnetic field applied to the molecule is varied. The points of degeneracy, or diabolical points in the magnetic field space, are found exactly in the simplest model Hamiltonian for this molecule. The points are shown to form a perfect centered rectangular lattice, and are shown to be multiply diabolical in general. The multiplicity is found. An earlier semiclassical solution to this problem is thereby shown to be exact in leading order in 1/J where J is the spin.