Delta chain with anisotropic ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions

Abstract

We consider analytically and numerically an anisotropic spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ delta-chain (sawtooth chain) with nearest-neighbor ferromagnetic and next-nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic interactions. For certain values of the interactions a lowest one-particle band becomes flat and there is a class of localized-magnon eigenstates which form a ground state with a macroscopic degeneracy. In this case the model depends on a single parameter which can be chosen as the anisotropy of the exchange interactions. When this parameter changes from zero to infinity the model interpolates between the one-dimensional isotropic ferromagnet and the frustrated Ising model on the delta-chain. It is shown that the low-temperature thermodynamic properties in these limiting cases are governed by the specific structure of the excitation spectrum. In particular, the specific heat has one or infinite number of low-temperature maxima for the small or the large anisotropy parameter, correspondingly. Numerical calculations of finite chains demonstrate that this behavior is generic for definite values of the anisotropy parameter.