Spin-liquid versus dimerized ground states in a frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet

We present a density matrix renormalization group study of the ground-state properties of spin-1/2 frustrated J1-J3 Heisenberg n(l)-leg ladders (with n(l) up to 8). For strong frustration (J(3)/J(1) approximately 0.5), both even-leg and odd-leg ladders display a finite gap to spin excitations, which we argue remains finite in the two-dimensional limit. In this regime, on odd-leg ladders the ground state is spontaneously dimerized, in agreement with the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis prediction, while on even-leg ladders the dimer correlations decay exponentially. The magnitude of the dimer order parameter decreases as the number of legs increases, consistent with a two-dimensional spin-liquid ground state.