Effect of Dzyaloshinskii−Moriya interactions on Kagome anti-ferromagnetic clusters

Abstract

The low energy and low temperature behavior of a few finite size Kagome clusters, including mixed spin systems of S=1/2 and S=1, with the nearest neighbor Heisenberg antiferromagnetic model is studied under the influence of out-of-plane Dzyaloshinskii−Moriya interactions (DMI) within the exact diagonalization formalism. The ground state of all the finite size systems is found to be present in the lowest spin sector with a finite gap to the lowest magnetic excitation irrespective of the strength of out-of-plane DMI. The energy level structures within the non-magnetic ground state and the lowest magnetic state have been studied for all the systems as a function of DMI. The characteristic signature of such low-lying non-magnetic excitations is reflected in the low temperature behavior of the specific heat. It is also found that the ground state chiral structure (characterized by the vector chiral order of the system) in the xy-plane shows sharp changes as a function of out-of-plane DMI at level crossing or avoided crossing regions. The in-plane spin ordering for each system is also studied with the estimation of static structure factor as a response to the varying strength of DMI.