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Quantum criticality in an asymmetric three-leg spin tube: A strong rung-coupling perspective

We study quantum phase transitions in the asymmetric variation of the three-leg Heisenberg tube for half-odd-integer spin, with a modulation of one of the rung exchange couplings $J'_\perp$ while the other two are kept constant $J_\perp$. We focus on the strong rung-coupling regime $J_\perp \gg J_\parallel$, where $J_\parallel$ is the leg coupling, and analyze the effective spin-orbital model with a transverse crystal field in detail. Applying the Abelian bosonization to the effective model, we find that the system is in the dimer phase for the general half-odd-integer-spin cases without the rung modulation; the phase transition between the dimer and Tomonaga-Luttinger-liquid phases induced by the rung modulation is of the SU(2)-symmetric Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless type. Moreover, we perform a level spectroscopy analysis for the effective model for spin-1/2 using exact diagonalization, to determine the precise transition point $| J'_\perp - J_\perp| /J_\parallel \sim 0.283$ in the strong rung-coupling limit. The presence of the dimer phase in a small but finite region is also confirmed by a density-matrix renormalization group calculation on the original spin-tube model.