The Plaquette Ground State of the Shastry-Sutherland Model

Abstract

I use the two-step density-matrix renormalization group method based on two-leg ladder expansion to show numerical evidence of a plaquette ground state for $J_2=1.3J_1$ in the Shastry-Sutherland model. I argue that the DMRG method is very efficient in the strong frustration regime of two-dimensional spin models where a spin-Peierls ground state is expected to occur. It is thus complementary to quantum Monte Carlo algorithms, which are known to work well in the small frustration regime but which are plagued by the sign problem in the strong frustration regime.