Identifying the ground state phases by spin-patterns in the Shastry-Sutherland model

Exploring the influence of frustration on the phases and related phase transitions in condensed matter physics is of fundamental importance in uncovering the role played by frustration. In the two-dimensional square lattice, a minimal frustration has been formulated in 1981 as the Shastry-Sutherland (SS) model described by competitions between the nearest-neighbor bond ($J_1$) and the next-nearest-neighbor one ($J_2$). In the two limits of $\alpha=J_2/J_1$, i.e. $\alpha \ll 1$ and $\alpha \gg 1$, the corresponding phases are the N{\'e}el antiferromagnet (AFM) and the dimer-singlet(DS). Unfortunately, the intermediate regime remains controversial, and the nature of transition from the N{\'e}el AFM to the intermediate state is also unclear. Here we provide a pattern language to explore the SS model and take the lattice size $L=4 \times4$ with periodic boundary condition. We firstly diagonalize the Hamiltonian in an operator space to obtain all fundamental spin-patterns and then analyze their energy and occupancy evolutions with the frustration parameter $\kappa=\alpha / (1+\alpha)$. Our results indicate that the intermediate regime is characterized by diagonal two-domain spin-pattern while the N{\'e}el AFM state has a diagonal single-domain and the DS has mixings of diagonal single- and four-domain. While the transition from the DS to the intermediate phase occurred around $\alpha_c = 1.5$ is the first-order in nature, consistent with that in literature, the one from the intermediate phase to the AFM is clearly seen around $\alpha_c = 1.277$, where it has a reversal of the contributions from the single- and two-domain patterns to the ground state. The result indicates that the pattern language is powerful in identifying the possible phases in frustrated models.