Exact treatment of magnetism-driven ferroelectricity in the one-dimensional compass model

Wen-Long You, Guang-Hua Liu, Peter Horsch, and Andrzej M. Oleś
Phys. Rev. B 90, 094413 – Published 19 September 2014

Abstract

We consider a class of one-dimensional compass models with antisymmetric Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya exchange interaction in an external magnetic field. Based on the exact solution derived by means of Jordan-Wigner transformation, we study the excitation gap, spin correlations, ground-state degeneracy, and critical properties at phase transitions. The phase diagram at finite electric and magnetic field consists of three phases: ferromagnetic, canted antiferromagnetic, and chiral. Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction induces an electrical polarization in the ground state of the chiral phase, where the nonlocal string order and special features of entanglement spectra arise, while strong chiral correlations emerge at finite temperature in the other phases and are controlled by a gap between the nonchiral ground state and the chiral excitations. We further show that the magnetoelectric effects in all phases disappear above a typical temperature corresponding to the total bandwidth of the effective fermionic model. To this end we explore the entropy, specific heat, magnetization, electric polarization, and the magnetoelectric tensor at finite temperature. We identify rather peculiar specific-heat and polarization behavior of the compass model which follows from highly frustrated interactions.

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  • Received 15 June 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.90.094413

©2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Wen-Long You1, Guang-Hua Liu2, Peter Horsch3, and Andrzej M. Oleś3,4

  • 1College of Physics, Optoelectronics and Energy, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215006, People's Republic of China
  • 2Department of Physics, Tianjin Polytechnic University, Tianjin 300387, People's Republic of China
  • 3Max-Planck-Institut für Festkörperforschung, Heisenbergstrasse 1, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany
  • 4Marian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagellonian University, Reymonta 4, PL-30059 Kraków, Poland

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Vol. 90, Iss. 9 — 1 September 2014

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