Frustrated spin-1/2 Heisenberg model on a Kagome-strip chain: Dimerization and mapping to a spin-orbital Kugel-Khomskii model

Abstract: We investigate the quantum phases of a frustrated antiferromagnetic Heisenberg spin-1/2 model Hamiltonian on a Kagome-strip chain (KSC), a one-dimensional analogue of the Kagome lattice, and construct its phase diagram in an extended exchange parameter space. The isolated unit cell of this lattice comprises of five spin-1/2 particles, giving rise to several types of magnetic ground states in a unit cell: a spin-$3/2$ state as well as spin-$1/2$ states with and without additional degeneracies. We explore the ground state properties of the fully connected thermodynamic system using exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods, identifying several distinct quantum phases. All but one of the phases exhibit gapless spin excitations. The exception is a dimerized spin-gapped phase that covers a large part of the phase diagram and includes the uniformly exchange coupled system. We argue that this phase can be understood by perturbing around the limit of decoupled unit cells where each unit cell has six degenerate ground states. We use degenerate perturbation theory to obtain an effective Hamiltonian, a Kugel-Khomskii model with an anisotropic spin-one orbital degree of freedom, which helps explain the origin of dimerization.