Thermal entanglement and sharp specific-heat peak in an exactly solved spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg ladder with alternating Ising and Heisenberg inter-leg couplings

The spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg two-leg ladder accounting for alternating Ising and Heisenberg inter-leg couplings in addition to the Ising intra-leg coupling is rigorously mapped onto to a mixed spin-(3/2,1/2) Ising-Heisenberg diamond chain with the nodal Ising spins S = 3/2 and the interstitial spin-1/2 Heisenberg dimers. The latter effective model with higher-order interactions between the nodal and interstitial spins is subsequently exactly solved within the transfer-matrix method. The model under investigation exhibits five different ground states: ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, superantiferromagnetic and two types of frustrated ground states with a non-zero residual entropy. A detailed study of thermodynamic properties reveals an anomalous specific-heat peak at low enough temperatures, which is strongly reminiscent because of its extraordinary height and sharpness to an anomaly accompanying a phase transition. It is convincingly evidenced, however, that the anomalous peak in the specific heat is finite and it comes from vigorous thermal excitations from a two-fold degenerate ground state towards a macroscopically degenerate excited state. Thermal entanglement between the nearest neighbor Heisenberg spins is also comprehensively explored by taking advantage of the concurrence. The threshold temperature delimiting a boundary between the entangled and disentangled parameter space may show presence of a peculiar temperature reentrance. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.