Spin-1/2 compass chain with modulated Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction

We investigate the effects of a modulated Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction on the one-dimensional spin-1/2 compass model, a prototypical model for exploring the physics of spin-orbit coupling in a variety of materials. The modulated DM interaction comprises uniform and staggered components with different magnitudes and orientations. Using the fermionization technique, we diagonalize the Hamiltonian exactly and obtain the energy spectrum and the ground state. We analyze the energy gap, the chiral and dimer order parameters, and the spin-spin correlation function to map out the ground-state phase diagram of the model.