Unconventional Thermal and Magnetic-Field-Driven Changes of a Bipartite Entanglement of a Mixed Spin-(1/2,<i>S</i>) Heisenberg Dimer with an Uniaxial Single-Ion Anisotropy

Abstract

The concept of negativity is adapted in order to explore the quantum and thermal entanglement of the mixed spin-(1/2,S) Heisenberg dimers in presence of an external magnetic field. The mutual interplay between the spin size S, XXZ exchange and uniaxial single-ion anisotropy is thoroughly examined with a goal to tune the degree and thermal stability of the pairwise entanglement. It turns out that the antiferromagnetic spin-(1/2,S) Heisenberg dimers exhibit higher degree of entanglement and higher threshold temperature in comparison with their ferromagnetic counterparts when assuming the same set of model parameters. The increasing spin magnitude S accompanied with an easy-plane uniaxial single-ion anisotropy can enhance not only the thermal stability but simultaneously the degree of entanglement. It is additionally shown that the further enhancement of a bipartite entanglement can be achieved in the mixed spin-(1/2,S) Heisenberg dimers, involving half-odd-integer spins S. Under this condition the thermal negativity saturates at low-enough temperatures in its maximal value regardless of the magnitude of half-odd-integer spin S. The magnetic field induces consecutive discontinuous phase transitions in the mixed spin-(1/2,S) Heisenberg dimers with S>1, which are manifested in a surprising oscillating magnetic-field dependence of the negativity observed at low enough temperature.

Keywords

• quantum and thermal entanglement
• spin-(1/2,S) Heisenberg dimer
• exact calculations
• uniaxial single-ion anisotropy