Monte Carlo Study of a Spin-3/2 Blume-Emery-Griffiths Model on a Honeycomb Lattice

Abstract

We study the phase diagram of the spin-3/2 Blume-Emery-Griffiths model on a honeycomb lattice by Monte Carlo simulations in order to verify the presence of some peculiar features predicted by the effective field theory (EFT) with correlations. The locations of the order-disorder phase boundaries are estimated from thermal variations of the magnetic susceptibility curves. It is found that for positive values of the biquadratic interactions the critical boundary shows a discontinuous character as a function of the single-ion anisotropy strength, in line with the EFT expectations. However, for negative values of the biquadratic interactions the step-like variation of the critical frontier predicted by EFT was not reproduced.