Eur. Phys. J. B 78, 535-541 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-10713-8

Properties of highly frustrated magnetic molecules studied by the finite-temperature Lanczos method

Department of Physics, Bielefeld University, PO Box 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany

Corresponding author: ^a jschnack@uni-bielefeld.de

Received: 16 September 2010
Revised: 9 November 2010
Published online: 15 December 2010

Abstract

The very interesting magnetic properties of frustrated magnetic molecules are often hardly accessible due to the prohibitive size of the related Hilbert spaces. The finite-temperature Lanczos method is able to treat spin systems for Hilbert space sizes up to 10⁹. Here we first demonstrate for exactly solvable systems that the method is indeed accurate. Then we discuss the thermal properties of one of the biggest magnetic molecules synthesized to date, the icosidodecahedron with antiferromagnetically coupled spins of s = 1/2. We show how genuine quantum features such as the magnetization plateau behave as a function of temperature.