Spontaneous Plaquette Dimerization in theJ1–J2Heisenberg Model

We investigate the nonmagnetic phase of the spin-half frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the square lattice using exact diagonalization (up to 36 sites) and quantum Monte Carlo techniques (up to 144 sites). The spin gap and the susceptibilities for the most important crystal symmetry breaking operators are computed. A genuine and somehow unexpected “plaquette resonating valence bond,” with spontaneously broken translation symmetry and no broken rotation symmetry, comes out from our numerical simulations as the most plausible ground state for $J_2{/J}_1\simeq 0.5$.