Effective Theory of Magnetization Plateaux in the Shastry-Sutherland Lattice

We use the nonperturbative Contractor-Renormalization method (CORE) in order to derive an effective model for triplet excitations on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice. For strong enough magnetic fields, various magnetization plateaux are observed, e.g., at 1/8, 1/4, 1/3 of the saturation, as found experimentally in a related compound. Moreover, other stable plateaux are found at 1/9, 1/6, or 2/9. We give a critical review of previous works and try to resolve some apparent inconsistencies between various theoretical approaches.