  We investigate the non magnetic 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 RVB', 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 $.
