Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 227
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-31159-4

Regular Article

Effects of bond alternation and the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction on the ground-state phase diagram of the Ising model

¹ Department of Physics, Tianjin Polytechnic University, Tianjin 300387, P.R. China
² Department of Physics, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, P.R. China
³ School of Physical Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215006, P.R. China
⁴ College of Physical Sciences, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 4588, Beijing 100049, P.R. China
⁵ School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China

^a e-mail: ghliu@pku.edu.cn

Received: 29 December 2012
Received in final form: 4 March 2013
Published online: 20 May 2013

Abstract

The bond-alternative ferromagnetic Ising model with the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction is investigated using an infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD) algorithm, and two interesting phase diagrams are proposed. Without bond alternation, there are only two well-known phases (a ferromagnetic phase and an x-y spiral (chiral Luttinger liquid) phase). Once the bond alternation is taken into account, two additional interesting phases (a z-chiral and a z-stripe phases) are induced. Nonzero chiral order is observed in all phases except the ferromagnetic phase. Two kinds of chiral phase, with or without string order, are identified. With the y-axis DM interaction, the phase diagram becomes relatively simple, and consists of only two different phases (a ferromagnetic phase and a y-chiral phase). First-order metamagnetic phase transitions from the ferromagnetic phase into the other phases are observed in both cases.