Elastic interaction among transition metals in one-dimensional spin-crossover solids

We present an exact examination of a one-dimensional (1D) spin-phonon model describing the thermodynamical properties of spin-crossover (SC) solids. This model has the advantage of giving a physical mechanism for the interaction between the SC units. The origin of the interaction comes from the fact that the elastic constant of the spring linking two atoms depends on their electronic states. This leads to local variation of the elastic constant. Up to now, all the statistical studies of this model have been performed in the frame of the mean-field (MF) approach, which is not adequate to describe 1D systems with short-range interactions. An alternative method, based on the variational approach and taking into account the short-range correlations between neighboring molecules, was also suggested, but it consists in an extension of the previous MF approximation. Here, we solve exactly this Hamiltonian in the frame of classical statistical mechanics using the transfer-matrix technique. The temperature dependence of the high spin fraction and that of the total energy are obtained analytically. Our results clearly show that there is a clear tendency to a sharp transition when we tune the elastic constants adequately, which indicates that first-order phase transition takes place at higher dimensions. In addition, we demonstrate the existence of an interesting isomorphism between the present model and Ising model under effective interaction and effective ligand field energy, in which both depend linearly on temperature and both come from the phonon contribution. We have also studied the effect of the pressure (the tension) on the thermodynamical properties of the high spin (HS) fraction and have found a nontrivial pressure effect that while for weak tension values, the low spin state is stabilized for the pressure above a threshold value, it enhances the interaction between the HS states. Finally, we have also introduced elastic interactions between the chains. Treating exactly (in mean field) the intrachain (interchain) contributions, we found that our model leads us to obtain first-order spin transitions when both short- and long-range interactions are ferroelastic. We show also that competing (antiferroelastic short-range and ferroelastic long-range) interactions between spin-state ions reproduce qualitatively the two-step-like spin-crossover transitions.