Phase diagram of the antiferromagnetic J1−J2 spin-1 pyrochlore Heisenberg model

Abstract

We study the phase diagram of the antiferromagnetic 𝐽1−𝐽2 Heisenberg model on the pyrochlore lattice with 𝑆=1 spins at zero and finite temperatures. We use a combination of complementary state-of-the-art quantum many-body approaches such as density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), density-matrix purification, and pseudo-Majorana functional renormalization group (PMFRG). We present an efficient approach to preserve the applicability of the PMFRG for spin-1 systems at finite temperatures despite the inevitable presence of unphysical spin states. The good performance of our methods is first demonstrated for the nearest-neighbor pyrochlore Heisenberg model where the finite-temperature behavior of the specific heat and uniform susceptibility show excellent agreement within PMFRG and density-matrix purification. Including an antiferromagnetic second-neighbor coupling we find that the nonmagnetic ground-state phase of the nearest-neighbor model extents up to 𝐽2/𝐽1∼0.02 within DMRG, beyond which magnetic 𝒌=0 long-range order sets in. Our PMFRG calculations find the phase transition in a similar regime 𝐽2/𝐽1∼0.035⁢(8) which, together with the DMRG result, provides a strong argument for the existence of a small but finite nonmagnetic ground-state phase in the spin-1 pyrochlore Heisenberg model. We also discuss the origin of discrepancies between different versions of the functional renormalization group concerning the location of this phase transition.