Multicritical behavior of the two-dimensional transverse Ising metamagnet in a longitudinal magnetic field

Abstract: Magnetic phenomena of the superantiferromagnetic Ising model in both uniform longitudinal ($H$) and transverse ($\Omega $) magnetic fields are studied by employing a mean-field variational approach based on Peierls-Bogoliubov inequality for the free energy. A single-spin cluster is used to get the approximate thermodynamic properties of the model. The phase diagrams in the magnetic fields and temperature ($T$) planes, namely, $H-T$ and $\Omega-T$, are analyzed on an anisotropic square lattice for some values of the ratio $\alpha=J_{y}/J_{x}$, where $J_x$ and $J_y$ are the exchange interactions along the $x$ and $y$ directions, respectively. Depending on the range of the Hamiltonian parameters, one has only second-order transition lines, only first-order transition lines, or first- and second-order transition lines with the presence of tricritical points. The corresponding phase diagrams show no reentrant behavior along the first-order transition lines at low temperatures. These results are different from those obtained by using Effective Field Theory with the same cluster size.