Phase transition induced by an external field in a three-dimensional isotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnet

Abstract

The critical frontier of the isotropic antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model in a magnetic field along the z-axis has been studied by mean-field and effective-field renormalization group calculations. These methods, abbreviated as MFRG and EFRG, are based on the comparison of two clusters of different sizes, each of them trying to mimic a specific Bravais lattice. The frontier line in the plane of temperature versus magnetic field was obtained for the simple cubic and the body-centered cubic lattices. Spin clusters with sizes N = 1, 2, 4 were used so as to implement MFRG-12, EFRG-12 and EFRG-24 numerical equations. For the simple cubic lattice, the MFRG frontier exhibits a notorious re-entrant behavior. This problem is improved by the EFRG technique. However, both methods agree at lower fields. For the body-centered cubic lattice, the MFRG method did not work. As in the cubic lattice, all the EFRG results agree at lower fields. Nevertheless, the EFRG-12 approach gave no solution for very low temperatures. Comparisons with other methods have been discussed.