Exotic quantum phase transitions in the spin nanotube

Abstract

We investigate the S = 1/2 three-leg spin tube, which is the simplest spin nanotube, using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and the numerical exact diagonalization (ED), conbined with a finite-size scaling analysis. Particularly, we intruduce the lattice distortion from the regular triangle unit to the isosceles one. In our previous works, we revealed that the S = 1/2 isosceles triangle spin tube exhibits following exotic quantum phenomena: the quantum phase transition between the spin gapped and gapless spin liquid phases, the 1/3 magnetization plateau due to two different mechanisms, and a new phase between the two plateau phases where the translational symmetry is spontaneously broken. We briefly review these results and show our new calculation of the expectation value of the magnetization at each site to specify the spin structure in the new field induced phase.