Honeycomb antiferromagnet with a triply degenerate dimer ground state

Rakesh Kumar, Dushyant Kumar, and Brijesh Kumar

Phys. Rev. B 80, 214428 – Published 30 December 2009

Abstract

We present an antiferromagnetic quantum spin-1/2 model on honeycomb lattice. It has two parts, one of which is the usual nearest-neighbor Heisenberg model. The other part is a certain multiple spin interaction term, introduced by us, which is exactly solvable for the ground state. Without the Heisenberg part, the model has an exact threefold degenerate dimer ground state. This exact ground state is also noted to exist for the general spin- $S$ case. For the spin-1/2 case, we further carry out the triplon analysis in the ground state to study the competition between the Heisenberg and the multiple spin interactions. This approximate calculation exhibits a continuous quantum phase transition from the dimer order to Néel order.