https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-023-04311-8
Regular Article
Magnetic-field-driven rise and fall of a bipartite entanglement in a spin-liquid phase of a spin-1/2 Heisenberg branched chain
Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Park Angelinum 9, 040 01, Košice, Slovakia
Received:
13
June
2023
Accepted:
24
July
2023
Published online:
4
August
2023
The spin-1/2 Heisenberg branched chain with the unit cell composed of three spins in the main backbone and one spin at a side branching of one-dimensional chain is investigated with the help of density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. The DMRG simulations were employed to calculate zero-temperature magnetization curves and to construct the ground-state phase diagram, which is composed from four different ground states classified as gapped zero-plateau and one-half plateau phase, a gapless spin-liquid phase and a fully saturated phase. It is shown that the one-half magnetization plateau vanishes at the Kosterlitz–Thouless quantum critical point, which is wedged into a parameter space of the gapless quantum spin-liquid phase. The bipartite quantum entanglement between four distinct nearest-neighbor pairs of the spin-1/2 Heisenberg branched chain is quantified through the concurrence. It is found that the concurrence varies continuously within the quantum spin-liquid phase, where it may display a continuous rise, a continuous fall or eventually an intriguing rise-and-fall behavior. On the contrary, the concurrence is kept constant within two gapful zero- and one-half plateau phases. Temperature and magnetic-field dependencies of the magnetization and magnetic susceptibility computed within the QMC method uncover clear signatures of the quantum critical point at finite temperatures.
© The Author(s) 2023
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.