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Physical Review B (Condensed Matter and Materials Physics) -- March 1, 1999 -- Volume 59, Issue 9, pp. 6239-6249

Surface spin-flop and discommensuration transitions in antiferromagnets

C. Micheletti

International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) and INFM, Via Beirut 2-4, 34014 Trieste, Italy
The Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy

R. B. Griffiths

Physics Department, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

J. M. Yeomans

Theoretical Physics, Oxford University, 1 Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3NP, United Kingdom

(Received 11 September 1998)

Phase diagrams as a function of anisotropy D and magnetic field H are obtained for discommensurations and surface states for an antiferromagnet in which H is parallel to the easy axis, by modeling it using the ground states of a one-dimensional chain of classical XY spins. A surface spin-flop phase exists for all D, but the interval in H over which it is stable becomes extremely small as D goes to zero. First-order transitions, separating different surface states and ending in critical points, exist inside the surface spin-flop region. They accumulate at a field H (depending on D) significantly less than the value H_SF for a bulk spin-flop transition. For H < H < H_SF there is no surface spin-flop phase in the strict sense; instead, the surface restructures by, in effect, producing a discommensuration infinitely far away in the bulk. The results are used to explain in detail the phase transitions occurring in systems consisting of a finite, even number of layers. ©1999 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v59/p6239
PACS: 75.10.Hk, 75.50.Ee, 75.30.Gw, 68.35.Rh        Additional Information

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Citing Articles

1. Localized spin flop transition in a ladder structure with nonmagnetic impurities
   B. A. Ivanov et al., J. Appl. Phys. 89, 7198 (2001)
2. Bulk and surface spin-flop transitions in an antiferromagnetic XYZ chain
   J. Karadamoglou et al., Phys. Rev. B 60, 9477 (1999)