Lifting mean field degeneracies in anisotropic spin systems

We propose a method for calculating the fluctuation contribution to the free energy of anisotropic spin systems with generic bilinear superexchange magnetic Hamiltonian based on the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation. We show that this contribution splits the set of mean field degenerate states with rotational symmetry, and chooses states with the order parameter directed along lattice symmetric directions as the true ground states. We consider the simple example of Heisenberg-compass model on cubic lattice to show that depending on the relative strength of the compass and Heisenberg interactions the spontaneous magnetization is pinned to either one of the cubic directions or one of the cubic body diagonals with a intermediate phase in between where the minima and maxima of the free energy interchange.