Magnetic Order-Disorder Transition in the Two-Dimensional Spatially Anisotropic Heisenberg Model at Zero Temperature

The ground-state properties of the spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model with spatially anisotropic couplings on a square lattice are investigated by a spin-rotation-invariant Green's-function approach and by Lanczos diagonalizations on lattices up to 36 sites supplemented by finite-size scaling. We focus on the anisotropy-driven transition from the N\'eel state to a paramagnetic state with antiferromagnetic short-range order and on the spatial dependence of spin correlation functions. Our principal result is that a rather sharp crossover in the magnetic behavior occurs at the coupling ratio $R_0\simeq 0.2$ ($R=J_y/J_x$).