Devil's staircases, quantum dimer models, and stripe formation in strong coupling models of quantum frustration
Abstract
We construct a two-dimensional microscopic model of interacting quantum dimers that displays an infinite number of periodic striped phases in its T=0 phase diagram. The phases form an incomplete devil's staircase and the period becomes arbitrarily large as the staircase is traversed. The Hamiltonian has purely short-range interactions, does not break any symmetries of the underlying square lattice, and is generic in that it does not involve the fine-tuning of a large number of parameters. Our model, a quantum mechanical analog of the Pokrovsky-Talapov model of fluctuating domain walls in two dimensional classical statistical mechanics, provides a mechanism by which striped phases with periods large compared to the lattice spacing can, in principle, form in frustrated quantum magnetic systems with only short-ranged interactions and no explicitly broken symmetries.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0611390,
title = {Devil's staircases, quantum dimer models, and stripe formation in strong coupling models of quantum frustration},
author = {S. Papanikolaou and K. S. Raman and E. Fradkin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0611390},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
21 pages, 27 figures