Phase Switch Driven by the Hidden Half-Ice, Half-Fire State in a Ferrimagnet

Abstract: The notion of "half fire, half ice" was recently introduced to describe an exotic macroscopic ground-state degeneracy emerging in a ferrimagnet under the critical magnetic field, in which the "hot" spins are fully disordered on the sublattice with smaller magnetic moments and the "cold" spins are fully ordered on the sublattice with larger magnetic moments. Here we further point out that this state has a twin named "half ice, half fire" in which the hot and cold spins switch positions. The new state is an excited state -- thus hidden in the ground-state phase diagram -- and is robust with respect to the interactions that destroy the half fire, half ice state. We demonstrate with exact results how this hidden state can drive phase switching at desirable finite temperature, even for the one-dimensional Ising model where phase transition at finite temperature is forbidden. We suggest that our findings may open a new door to the understanding and controlling of phase competition and transition in unconventional frustrated systems.