Ordering phenomena in a heterostructure of frustrated and unfrustrated triangular-lattice Ising layers

We study critical and magnetic properties of a bilayer Ising system consisting of two triangular planes A and B, with the antiferromagnetic (AF) coupling JA and the ferromagnetic (FM) one JB for the respective layers, which are coupled by the interlayer interaction JAB by using Monte Carlo simulations. When JA and JB are of the same order, the unfrustrated FM plane orders first at a high temperature Tc1∼JB. The spontaneous FM order then exerts influence on the other frustrated AF plane as an effective magnetic field, which subsequently induces a ferrimagnetic order in this plane at low temperatures below Tc2. When short-range order is developed in the AF plane while the influence of the FM plane is still small, there appears a preemptive Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-type pseudocritical crossover regime just above the ferrimagnetic phase transition point, where the short-distance behavior up to a rather large length scale exponentially diverging in JA/T is controlled by a line of Gaussian fixed points at T=0. In the crossover region, a continuous variation in the effective critical exponent 49ηeff12 is observed. The phase diagram by changing the ratio JA/JB is also investigated.