Classical ground states of symmetrical Heisenberg spin systems

Abstract

We investigate the ground states of classical Heisenberg spin systems which have point group symmetry. Examples are the regular polygons (spin rings) and the seven quasi-regular polyhedra including the five Platonic solids. For these examples, ground states with special properties, e.g. coplanarity or symmetry, can be completely enumerated using group-theoretical methods. For systems having coplanar (anti-) ground states with vanishing total spin we also calculate the smallest and largest energies of all states having a given total spin S. We find that these extremal energies depend quadratically on S and prove that, under certain assumptions, this happens only for systems with coplanar S=0 ground states. For general systems the corresponding parabolas represent lower and upper bounds for the energy values. This provides strong support and clarifies the conditions for the so-called rotational band structure hypothesis which has been numerically established for many quantum spin systems.