Monte Carlo simulations of an Ising bilayer with non-equivalent planes

Abstract

We study the thermodynamic and magnetic properties of an Ising bilayer ferrimagnet. The system is composed of two interacting non-equivalent planes in which the intralayer couplings are ferromagnetic while the interlayer interactions are antiferromagnetic. Moreover, one of the planes is randomly diluted. The study is carried out within a Monte Carlo approach employing the multiple histogram reweighting method and finite-size scaling tools. The occurrence of a compensation phenomenon is verified and the compensation temperature, as well as the critical temperature for the model, are obtained as functions of the Hamiltonian parameters. We present a detailed discussion of the regions of the parameter space where the compensation effect is present or absent. Our results are then compared to a mean-field-like approximation applied to the same model by Balcerzak and Sza{\l}owski (2014). Although the Monte Carlo and mean-field results agree qualitatively, our quantitative results are significantly different.