Spin frustration of a spin-1/2 Ising–Heisenberg three-leg tube as an indispensable ground for thermal entanglement

•Spin-1/2 Ising–Heisenberg three-leg tube is exactly solved in a zero magnetic field.•Thermal entanglement is only present in a frustrated part of the parameter space.•Spin frustration and thermal entanglement show antagonistic reentrance.•Specific heat may display a sharp narrow peak due to massive thermal excitations.

The spin-1/2 Ising–Heisenberg three-leg tube composed of the Heisenberg spin triangles mutually coupled through the Ising inter-triangle interaction is exactly solved in a zero magnetic field. By making use of the local conservation for the total spin on each Heisenberg spin triangle the model can be rigorously mapped onto a classical composite spin-chain model, which is subsequently exactly treated through the transfer-matrix method. The ground-state phase diagram, correlation functions, concurrence, Bell function, entropy and specific heat are examined in detail. It is shown that the spin frustration represents an indispensable ground for a thermal entanglement, which is quantified by the quantum concurrence. The specific heat displays diverse temperature dependences, which may include a sharp low-temperature peak mimicking a temperature-driven first-order phase transition. It is convincingly evidenced that this anomalous peak originates from massive thermal excitations from the doubly degenerate ground state towards an excited state with a high macroscopic degeneracy due to chiral degrees of freedom of the Heisenberg spin triangles.