Low-temperature magnetization curves and thermodynamics of a frustrated spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Heisenberg triangular bilayer with the antiferromagnetic intradimer interaction and either ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic interdimer interaction are investigated in a highly frustrated parameter region, where localized many-magnon eigenstates provide the most dominant contribution to magnetothermodynamics. Low-energy states of the highly frustrated spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Heisenberg triangular bilayer can be accordingly found from a mapping correspondence with an effective triangular-lattice spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Ising model in a field. A description based on the effective Ising model implies that the frustrated Heisenberg triangular bilayer with the ferromagnetic interdimer coupling displays in a zero-temperature magnetization curve discontinuous magnetization jump, which is reduced upon increasing of temperature until a continuous field-driven phase transition from the Ising universality class is reached at a certain critical temperature. The frustrated Heisenberg triangular bilayer with the antiferromagnetic interdimer coupling contrarily exhibits multistep magnetization curve with intermediate plateaus at $\frac{1}{3}$ and $\frac{2}{3}$ of the saturation magnetization, whereas discontinuous magnetization jumps observable at zero temperature change to continuous field-driven phase transitions from the universality class of three-state Potts model at sufficiently low temperatures. Exact results and Monte Carlo simulations of the effective Ising model are confronted with full exact diagonalization data for the Heisenberg triangular bilayer in order to corroborate these findings.

• Received 20 July 2018
• Revised 24 September 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.98.174426