Finitely correlated generalized spin ladders

We study two-leg S = 1/2 ladders with general isotropic exchange interactions between spins on neighboring rungs, whose ground state can be found exactly in a form of finitely correlated (matrix product) wave function. Two families of models admitting an exact solution are found: one yields translationally invariant ground states and the other describes spontaneously dimerized models with twofold degenerate ground state. Several known models with exact ground states (Majumdar-Ghosh and Shastry-Sutherland spin-1/2 chains, Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki spin-1 chain, Delta-chain, Bose-Gayen ladder model) can be obtained as particular cases from the general solution of the first family, which includes also a set of models with only bilinear interactions. Those two families of models have nonzero intersection, which enables us to determine exactly the phase boundary of the second-order transition into the dimerized phase and to study the properties of this transition. The structure of elementary excitations in the dimerized phase is discussed on the basis of a variational ansatz. For a particular class of models, we present exact wave functions of the elementary excitations becoming gapless at second-order transition lines. We also propose a generalization of the Bose-Gayen model which has a rich phase diagram with all phase boundaries being exact.