Ordering phenomena in a heterostructure of frustrated and unfrustrated triangular-lattice Ising layers.

Abstract

We study critical and magnetic properties of a bilayer Ising system consisting of two triangular planes A and B, with the antiferromagnetic (AF) coupling J_{A} and the ferromagnetic (FM) one J_{B} for the respective layers, which are coupled by the interlayer interaction J_{AB} by using Monte Carlo simulations. When J_{A} and J_{B} are of the same order, the unfrustrated FM plane orders first at a high temperature T_{c1}∼J_{B}. The spontaneous FM order then exerts influence on the other frustrated AF plane as an effective magnetic field, which subsequently induces a ferrimagnetic order in this plane at low temperatures below T_{c2}. When short-range order is developed in the AF plane while the influence of the FM plane is still small, there appears a preemptive Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-type pseudocritical crossover regime just above the ferrimagnetic phase transition point, where the short-distance behavior up to a rather large length scale exponentially diverging in ∝J_{A}/T is controlled by a line of Gaussian fixed points at T=0. In the crossover region, a continuous variation in the effective critical exponent 4/9≲η^{eff}≲1/2 is observed. The phase diagram by changing the ratio J_{A}/J_{B} is also investigated.