Incommensurate spiral magnetic order on anisotropic triangular lattice: Dynamical mean-field study in a spin-rotating frame

Abstract

We study the ground-state magnetism of the half-filled Hubbard model on the anisotropic triangular lattice, where two out of three bonds have hopping $t$ and the third one has $t^\prime$ in a unit triangle. Working in a spin-rotating frame and using the density matrix renormalization group method as an impurity solver, we provide a proper description of incommensurate magnetizations at zero temperature in the framework of the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). It is shown that the incommensurate spiral magnetic order for $t^\prime/t\gtrsim 0.7$ survives the dynamical fluctuations of itinerant electrons in the Hubbard interaction range from the strong-coupling (localized-spin) limit down to the insulator-to-metal transition. We also find that the magnetic moment reduction from the localized-spin limit is pronounced in the vicinity of the transition between the commensurate N\'eel and incommensurate spiral phases at $t^\prime/t\sim 0.7$. When the anisotropy parameter $t^\prime/t$ increases from the N\'eel-to-spiral transition, the magnitude of the magnetic moment immediately reaches a maximum and then rapidly decreases in the range of larger $t^\prime/t$ including the isotropic triangular lattice point $t^\prime/t=1$. This work gives a solid foundation for further extension of the study including nonlocal correlation effects neglected at the standard DMFT level.