Impurity susceptibility and the fate of spin-flop transitions in lightly-doped La(2)CuO(4)

We investigate the occurrence of a two-step spin-flop transition and spin reorientation when a longitudinal magnetic field is applied to lightly hole-doped La(2)CuO(4). We find that for large and strongly frustrating impurities, such as Sr in La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4), the huge enhancement of the longitudinal susceptibility suppresses the intermediate flop and the reorientation of spins is smooth and continuous. Contrary, for small and weakly frustrating impurities, such as O in La(2)CuO(4+y), a discontinuous spin reorientation (two-step spin-flop transition) takes place. Furthermore, we show that for La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4) the field dependence of the magnon gaps differs qualitatively from the La(2)CuO(4) case, a prediction to be verified with Raman spectroscopy or neutron scattering.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, For the connection between spin-flops and magnetoresistance, see cond-mat/061081

Magnetic quantum phase transitions of the antiferromagnetic J_{1}-J_{2} Heisenberg model

We obtain the complete phase diagram of the antiferromagnetic $J_{1}$-$J_{2}$ model, $0\leq \alpha = J_2/J1 \leq 1$, within the framework of the $O(N)$ nonlinear sigma model. We find two magnetically ordered phases, one with N\' eel order, for $\alpha \leq 0.4$, and another with collinear order, for $\alpha\geq 0.6$, separated by a nonmagnetic region, for $0.4\leq \alpha \leq 0.6$, where a gapped spin liquid is found. The transition at $\alpha=0.4$ is of the second order while the one at $\alpha=0.6$ is of the first order and the spin gaps cross at $\alpha=0.5$. Our results are exact at $N\rightarrow\infty$ and agree with numerical results from different methods.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Metallic Continuum Quantum Ferromagnets at Finite Temperature

We study via renormalization group (RG) and large N methods the problem of continuum SU(N) quantum Heisenberg ferromagnets (QHF) coupled to gapless electrons. We establish the phase diagram of the dissipative problem and investigate the changes in the Curie temperature, magnetization, and magnetic correlation length due to dissipation and both thermal and quantum fluctuations. We show that the interplay between the topological term (Berry's phase) and dissipation leads to non-trivial effects for the finite temperature critical behavior.Comment: Corrected typos, new discussion of T=0 results, to appear in Europhys. Let

Symplectic Quantization for Reducible Systems

We study an extension of the symplectic formalism in order to quantize reducible systems. We show that a procedure like {\it ghost-of-ghost} of the BFV method can be applied in terms of Lagrange multipliers. We use the developed formalism to quantize the antisymmetric Abelian gauge fields.Comment: 12 pages, IF-UFRJ-22/9

Particle Creation by a Moving Boundary with Robin Boundary Condition

We consider a massless scalar field in 1+1 dimensions satisfying a Robin boundary condition (BC) at a non-relativistic moving boundary. We derive a Bogoliubov transformation between input and output bosonic field operators, which allows us to calculate the spectral distribution of created particles. The cases of Dirichlet and Neumann BC may be obtained from our result as limiting cases. These two limits yield the same spectrum, which turns out to be an upper bound for the spectra derived for Robin BC. We show that the particle emission effect can be considerably reduced (with respect to the Dirichlet/Neumann case) by selecting a particular value for the oscillation frequency of the boundary position