Magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of the exactly solvable mixed-spin Ising model on a decorated triangular lattice in a magnetic field

Abstract

The ground state, zero-temperature magnetization process, critical behaviour and isothermal entropy change of the mixed-spin Ising model on a decorated triangular lattice in a magnetic field are exactly studied after performing the generalized decoration-iteration mapping transformation. It is shown that both the inverse and conventional magnetocaloric effect can be found near the absolute zero temperature. The former phenomenon can be found in a vicinity of the discontinuous phase transitions and their crossing points, while the latter one occurs in some paramagnetic phases due to a spin frustration to be present at zero magnetic field. The inverse magnetocaloric effect can also be detected slightly above continuous phase transitions following the power-law dependence |−ΔSisomin|∝hn, where n depends basically on the ground-state spin ordering.