Interplay between spin frustration and thermal entanglement in the exactly solved Ising-Heisenberg tetrahedral chain

The spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg tetrahedral chain is exactly solved using its local gauge symmetry (the total spin of the Heisenberg bonds is locally conserved) and the transfer-matrix approach. Exact results derived for spin-spin correlation functions are employed to obtain the frustration temperature. In addition, we have exactly calculated a concurrence quantifying thermal entanglement. It is shown that the frustration and threshold temperature coincide at sufficiently low temperatures, while they exhibit a very different behavior in the high-temperature region when tending towards completely different asymptotic limits. The threshold temperature additionally shows a notable reentrant behavior when it extends over a narrow temperature region above the classical ground state without any quantum correlations. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.