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Understanding the nature of all possible ground states and especially magnetic-field-driven phase transitions of antiferromagnets represents a major step towards unravelling the real nature of interesting phenomena such as superconductivity, multiferroicity or magnetoresistance in condensed-matter science. Here a consistent mean-field calculation endowed with antiferromagnetic (AFM) exchange interaction ( J ), easy axis anisotropy ( γ ), uniaxial single-ion anisotropy ( D ) and Zeeman coupling to a magnetic field parallel to the AFM easy axis consistently unifies the AFM state, spin-flop (SFO) and spin-flip transitions. We reveal some mathematically allowed exotic spin states and fluctuations depending on the relative coupling strength of ( J , γ and D ). We build the three-dimensional ( J , γ and D ) and two-dimensional ( γ and D ) phase diagrams clearly displaying the equilibrium phase conditions and discuss the origins of various magnetic states as well as their transitions in different couplings. Besides the traditional first-order type one, we unambiguously confirm an existence of a second-order type SFO transition. This study provides an integrated theoretical model for the magnetic states of collinear antiferromagnets with two interpenetrating sublattices and offers a practical approach as an alternative to the estimation of magnetic exchange parameters ( J , γ and D ), and the results may shed light on nontrivial magnetism-related properties of bulks, thin films and nanostructures of correlated electron systems.
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Haifeng Li (2016) studied this question.