Ground-state phase diagram of anisotropically interacting Heisenberg-$\Gamma$ models on a honeycomb lattice

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the ground-state phase diagram of the $S=1/2$ Heisenberg-$\Gamma$ model on a honeycomb lattice by dimer series expansion and exact diagonalization. We focus on the effects of the anisotropy of the interactions; by tuning the coupling constants, the system changes between the isolated dimer and the spin-chain models. We find that, in the spin-chain limit, there are three kinds of states: a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid and two magnetically long-range-ordered states. All three states become two-dimensional long-range ordered states by the infinitesimal interchain interaction except for the case where the Heisenberg interaction is much weaker than the off-diagonal symmetric ($\Gamma$) interaction. Starting from the isolated dimer limit, a triplet dimer phase survives up to the isotropically interacting system in a large part of the phase diagram where the Heisenberg and $\Gamma$ interactions are ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic, respectively. Otherwise, a phase transition to a magnetically ordered phase occurs before the interaction becomes isotropic. This indicates that the quantum spin liquid proposed in the $\Gamma$ model [A. Catuneanu et al., npj Quantum Mater. 3, 23 (2018)] is unstable against the anisotropy of the interactions.