Spin excitation of the Heisenberg antiferromagnet with frustration: from the bounce-lattice antiferromagnet through the maple-leaf-lattice antiferromagnet to the exact-dimer system

The spin- S Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the two-dimensional lattice is investigated for S = 1/2 and S = 1. We consider interaction at isolated dimers ( J d ) and interaction bonds that form the bounce lattice ( J b ). For J d = J b , the system is reduced to the maple-leaf-lattice antiferromagnet. We primarily conduct highly parallelized numerical diagonalization to examine the spin excitation gap above the ground state for various J b / J d cases. For S = 1/2, we report calculations for a 42-site cluster that has not been previously treated. The S = 1 case is examined for the first time for clusters up to 24 sites. Regardless of whether S = 1/2 or 1, we find that the system has a gapped nature for small J d / J b and becomes gapless at J d / J b ∼ 1.4. For S = 1, we also find that another gapped region appears between the gapless case at J d / J b ∼ 1.4 and the boundary of the exact-dimer phase.