Magnetization of the Shastry-Sutherland antiferromagnet near the Ising limit

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on TmB4 (arXiv:0712.1537), we examine the phase diagram of the Shastry-Sutherland antiferromagnet in an applied magnetic field in the limit of strong Ising anisotropy. In classical Ising limit, we demonstrate that the only fractional magnetization plateau is at 1/3 of the saturated magnetization. We study the perturbative influence of transverse quantum spin fluctuations, and present evidence that they can stabilize a narrow 1/2 magnetization plateau.

10 pages, 7 figures