Field-induced transitions and spatial chaos in the classical XY spin chain

Abstract

We study the lowest-lying excitation of a classical ferromagnetic XY spin chain, in the presence of a symmetry breaking magnetic field. Extremizing the energy of this system leads to a two-dimensional nonlinear map, whose allowed phase space shrinks with increasing field in a nontrivial manner. The orbits of the map represent the set of extremum energy spin configurations. For each field, we compute the energy of the members of this set and find the lowest energy among them, excluding the obvious ground state configuration with all spins parallel along the field direction. This state turns out to be the unstable fixed point of the map. We show that up to a certain (primary) critical field, a separatrixlike 2pi soliton configuration is the lowest-energy excitation, with an energy very close to the ground state energy. For any field beyond this critical field, the soliton disappears and lowest excitation is a librational configuration corresponding to the outermost orbit in the phase plot at that field. Further, its energy is found to be much higher than the ground state energy, leading to a sharp jump in the difference in energy between the former and the latter at this field. With further increase in the field, sharp jumps in the excitation energy arise at certain secondary critical fields as well. We show that these appear when the corresponding spin configurations become commensurate. This complex behavior of the energy is interpreted and its effect on the magnetization and static susceptibility of the system is also studied.