Macroscopic ground state degeneracy of the ferro-antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on diamond-decorated lattices

Abstract: We investigate the spin-1/2 Heisenberg model with competing ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions on diamond-decorated lattices. Tuning the exchange interactions to the boundary of the ferromagnetic phase, we analyze the models with two types of diamond units: distorted and ideal diamonds. In the distorted diamond model, flat bands in the magnon spectra indicate the localized states confined to small regions (`trapping cells') of the lattice. Remarkably, these trapping cells can host up to five and seven localized states for square and cubic lattices, respectively, leading to the macroscopic ground state degeneracy and high value of residual entropy. The problem of calculating ground state degeneracy reduces to that of non-interacting spins, whose spin value equal to half the number of localized magnons in the trapping cell. In contrast, ideal diamond models feature ground states composed of randomly distributed isolated diamond diagonal singlets immersed in a ferromagnetic background. Counting the ground state degeneracies here maps onto the percolation problem in 2D and 3D lattices. Our analysis shows that ideal diamond models possess even greater ground state degeneracy than their distorted counterparts. These findings suggest that synthesizing diamond-decorated-type compounds holds great promise for low-temperature cooling applications.