Macroscopic quantum coherence in antiferromagnetic molecular magnets

Abstract

The macroscopic quantum coherence in a biaxial antiferromagnetic molecular magnet in the presence of magnetic field acting parallel to its hard anisotropy axis is studied within the two-sublattice model. On the basis of instanton technique in the spin-coherent-state path-integral representation, both the rigorous Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin exponent and preexponential factor for the ground-state tunnel splitting are obtained. We find that the quantum fluctuations around the classical paths can not only induce a new quantum phase previously reported by Chiolero and Loss (Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 169 (1998)), but also have great influnence on the intensity of the ground-state tunnel splitting. Those features clearly have no analogue in the ferromagnetic molecular magnets. We suggest that they may be the universal behaviors in all antiferromagnetic molecular magnets. The analytical results are complemented by exact diagonalization calculation.