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Ferrimagnetic spin-1/2 chain of alternating Ising and Heisenberg spins in arbitrarily oriented magnetic field

The ferrimagnetic spin-1/2 chain composed of alternating Ising and Heisenberg spins in an arbitrarily oriented magnetic field is exactly solved using the spin-rotation transformation and the transfer-matrix method. It is shown that the low-temperature magnetization process depends basically on a spatial orientation of the magnetic field. A sharp stepwise magnetization curve with a marked intermediate plateau, which emerges for the magnetic field applied along the easy-axis direction of the Ising spins, becomes smoother and the intermediate plateau shrinks if the external field is tilted from the easy-axis direction. The magnetization curve of a polycrystalline system is also calculated by performing powder averaging of the derived magnetization formula. The proposed spin-chain model brings an insight into high-field magnetization data of 3d-4f bimetallic polymeric compound Dy(NO_3)(DMSO)_2Cu(opba)(DMSO)_2, which provides an interesting experimental realization of the ferrimagnetic chain composed of two different but regularly alternating spin-1/2 magnetic ions Dy^{3+} and Cu^{2+} that are reasonably approximated by the notion of Ising and Heisenberg spins, respectively.