Spin ladder with anisotropic ferromagnetic legs in a transverse magnetic field.

We have studied the ground-state phase diagram of a two-leg spin ladder with anisotropic ferromagnetic leg couplings under the influence of a symmetry-breaking transverse magnetic field by the exact diagonalization technique. In the case of antiferromagnetic coupling between legs we identified two phase transitions in the plane of magnetic field versus interchain coupling strength. The first corresponds to the transition from the gapped rung-singlet phase to the gapped stripe-ferromagnetic phase. The second represents the transition from the gapped stripe-ferromagnetic phase into the fully polarized ferromagnetic phase.