We study the quantum and thermal phase transition phenomena of the SU(3) Heisenberg model on triangular lattice in the presence of magnetic fields. Performing a scaling analysis on large-size cluster mean-field calculations endowed with a density-matrix renormalization-group solver, we reveal the quantum phases selected by quantum fluctuations from the massively degenerate classical ground-state manifold. The magnetization process up to saturation reflects three different magnetic phases. The low- and high-field phases have strong nematic nature, and especially the latter is found only via a nontrivial reconstruction of symmetry generators from the standard spin and quadrupolar description. We also perform a semiclassical Monte Carlo simulation to show that thermal fluctuations prefer the same three phases as well. Moreover, we find that exotic topological phase transitions driven by the binding-unbinding of fractional (half-)vortices take place, due to the nematicity of the low- and high-field phases. Possible experimental realization with alkaline-earth-like cold atoms is also discussed.

中文翻译：

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三角SU（3）Heisenberg模型在磁场下的量子和热相变。

我们研究了存在磁场的三角晶格上SU（3）Heisenberg模型的量子和热相变现象。对赋予密度矩阵重新归一化组求解器的大型簇平均场计算进行比例分析，我们揭示了量子波动从大规模简并的经典基态流形中选择的量子相。达到饱和的磁化过程会反射三个不同的磁相。低场和高场相具有很强的向列性质，尤其是后者只能通过从标准自旋和四极杆描述中对称发生器的非平凡重构中找到。我们还执行了半经典的蒙特卡洛模拟，以表明热波动也喜欢相同的三相。此外，我们发现，由于低场和高场相的向列性，由分数（半）涡旋的结合-解离驱动了奇异的拓扑相变。还讨论了类似碱土类冷原子的可能的实验实现。