Phase structure of the anisotropic antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a layered triangular lattice: Spiral state and deconfined spin liquid

Abstract

In the present paper, we study a spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic (AF) Heisenberg model on layered anisotropic triangular lattice and obtain its phase structure. We use the Schwinger bosons for representing spin operators and also a coherent-state path integral for calculating physical quantities. Finite-temperature properties of the system are investigated by means of the numerical Monte-Carlo simulations. A detailed phase diagram of the system is obtained by calculating internal energy, specific heat, spin correlation functions, etc. There are AF N\'eel, paramagnetic, and spiral states. Turning on the plaquette term (i.e., the Maxwell term on a lattice) of an emergent U(1) gauge field that flips a pair of parallel spin-singlet bonds, we found that there appears a phase that is regarded as a deconfined spin-liquid state, though ``transition'' to this phase from the paramagnetic phase is not of second order but a crossover. In that phase, the emergent gauge boson is a physical gapless excitation coupled with spinons. These results support our previous study on an AF Heisenberg model on a triangular lattice at vanishing temperature.