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Register a new userHeat conductivity of the spin-Peierls compounds TiOCl and TiOBr
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We report experimental results on the heat conductivity kappa of the S=1/2 spin chain compounds TiOBr and TiOCl for temperatures 5K<T<300K and magnetic fields up to 14. Surprisingly, we find no evidence of a significant magnetic contribution to kappa, which is in stark contrast to recent results on S=1/2 spin chain cuprates. Despite this unexpected result, the thus predominantly phononic heat conductivity of these spin-Peierls compounds exhibits a very unusual behavior. In particular, we observe strong anomalies at the phase transitions Tc1 and Tc2. Moreover, we find an overall but anisotropic suppression of kappa in the intermediate phase which extends even to temperatures higher than Tc2. An external magnetic field causes a slight downshift of the transition at Tc1 and enhances the suppression of kappa up to Tc2. We interprete our findings in terms of strong spin-phonon coupling and phonon scattering arising from spin-driven lattice distortions.
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We report high-pressure x-ray diffraction and magnetization measurements combined with ab-initio calculations to demonstrate that the high-pressure optical and transport transitions recently reported in TiOCl, correspond in fact to an enhanced Ti3+-Ti3+ dimerization existing already at room temperature. Our results confirm the formation of a metal-metal bond between Ti3+ ions along the b-axis of TiOCl, accompanied by a strong reduction of the electronic gap. The evolution of the dimerization with pressure suggests a crossover from the spin-Peierls to a conventional Peierls situation at high pressures.
The application of pressure can induce transitions between unconventional quantum phases in correlated materials. The inorganic compound TiOCl, composed of chains of S=1/2 Ti ions, is an ideal realization of a spin-Peierls system with a relatively simple unit cell. At ambient pressure, it is an insulator due to strong electronic interactions (a Mott insulator). Its resistivity shows a sudden decrease with increasing pressure, indicating a transition to a more metallic state which may coincide with the emergence of charge density wave order. Therefore, high pressure studies of the structure with x-rays are crucial in determining the ground-state physics in this quantum magnet. In ambient pressure, TiOCl exhibits a transition to an incommensurate nearly dimerized state at $T_{c2}=92$ K and to a commensurate dimerized state at $T_{c1}=66$ K. Here, we discover a rich phase diagram as a function of temperature and pressure using x-ray diffraction on a single crystal in a diamond anvil cell down to $T=4$ K and pressures up to 14.5 GPa. Remarkably, the magnetic interaction scale increases dramatically with increasing pressure, as indicated by the high onset temperature of the spin-Peierls phase. At $sim$7 GPa, the extrapolated onset of the spin-Peierls phase occurs above $T=300$ K, indicating a quantum singlet state exists at room temperature. Further comparisons are made with the phase diagrams of related spin-Peierls systems that display metallicity and superconductivity under pressure.
Pressure-dependent transmittance and reflectance spectra of TiOBr and TiOCl single crystals at room temperature suggest the closure of the Mott-Hubbard gap, i.e., the gap is filled with additional electronic states extending down to the far-infrared range. According to pressure-dependent x-ray powder diffraction data the gap closure coincides with a structural phase transition. The transition in TiOBr occurs at slightly lower pressure ($p$=14 GPa) compared to TiOCl ($p$=16 GPa) under hydrostatic conditions, which is discussed in terms of the chemical pressure effect. The results of pressure-dependent transmittance measurements on TiOBr at low temperatures reveal similar effects at 23 K, where the compound is in the spin-Peierls phase at ambient pressure.
We present detailed ESR investigations on single crystals of the low-dimensional quantum magnet TiOCl. The anisotropy of the g-factor indicates a stable orbital configuration below room temperature, and allows to estimate the energy of the first excited state as 0.3(1) eV ruling out a possible degeneracy of the orbital ground state. Moreover, we discuss the possible spin relaxation mechanisms in TiOCl and analyze the angular and temperature dependence of the linewidth up to 250 K in terms of anisotropic exchange interactions. Towards higher temperatures an exponential increase of the linewidth is observed, indicating an additional relaxation mechanism.
We extend previous analytical studies of the ground-state phase diagram of a one-dimensional Heisenberg spin chain coupled to optical phonons, which for increasing spin-lattice coupling undergoes a quantum phase transition from a gap-less to a gaped phase with finite lattice dimerisation. We check the analytical results against established four-block and new two-block density matrix renormalisation group (DMRG) calculations. Different finite-size scaling behaviour of the spin excitation gaps is found in the adiabatic and anti-adiabatic regimes.
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