Monte Carlo study of the phase diagram of layered XY antiferromagnet

Abstract

The three-dimensional XY model is investigated in the presence of a uniform magnetic field applied in the X-direction. The nearest neighbour intraplanar interaction is considered ferromagnetic, and the interplanar nearest neighbour interaction is chosen to be antiferromagnetic. Starting from a high-temperature initial random spin configuration, the equilibrium phase of the system at any finite temperature was achieved by cooling the system using the Monte Carlo single spin-flip Metropolis algorithm with a random updating rule. The components of total magnetization and the sublattice magnetizations were calculated. The variance of the antiferromagnetic order parameter and the susceptibility have been calculated. In a specific range of relative strengths of interactions (antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic) and the applied magnetic field, the system shows the equilibrium phase transitions at different temperatures. The phase diagrams (in the field-temperature plane) were obtained for different values of the relative interaction strengths. The ordered region bounded by the phase boundary was found to increase as the ratio of relative interaction strength increased. Furthermore, the maximum value of the susceptibility (χaym) was found to increase with the system size (L). For χaym∼Lγν, the exponent γ/ν has been estimated to be 2.10 ±0.11.