Frustration relief and reorientation transition in the kagomelike dolerophanite Cu₂OSO₄

We present a theoretical study of dolerophanite Cu₂OSO₄, a layered kagomelike spin- ½ magnetic insulator that can be described either as a system of chains coupled through dimers or as a kagome lattice where every third spin is replaced by a ferromagnetic spin dimer. Building on insights from ab initio calculations, classical numerical minimizations, and semiclassical expansions, we arrive at a minimal microscopic description that accounts for the experimental data reported so far, including the nature of the magnetic order, the reported spin length, and the observed anisotropy. The latter arises by a peculiar competition between the antisymmetric (Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya) and the symmetric part of the exchange anisotropy, which gives rise to a two-step reorientation process involving two successive continuous phase transitions. In this paper, we uncover mechanisms stabilizing canted ferrimagnetic order in kagome systems and highlight strong magnetic anisotropy in the presence of dissimilar magnetic orbitals on crystallographically nonequivalent Cu sites. We also show how these anisotropy terms affect the spin-wave spectrum and how they can be tracked experimentally.