No Arabic abstract
We carried out AC magnetic susceptibility measurements and muon spin relaxation spectroscopy on the cubic double perovskite Ba2YMoO6, down to 50 mK. Below ~1 K the muon relaxation is typical of a magnetic insulator with a spin-liquid type ground state, i.e. without broken symmetries or frozen moments. However, the AC susceptibility revealed a dilute-spin-glass like transition below ~ 1 K. Antiferromagnetically coupled Mo5+ 4d1 electrons in triply degenerate t2g orbitals are in this material arranged in a geometrically frustrated fcc lattice. Bulk magnetic susceptibility data has previously been interpreted in terms of a freezing to a heterogeneous state with non-magnetic sites where 4d^1 electrons have paired in spin-singlets dimers, and residual unpaired Mo5+ 4d1 electrons. Based on the magnetic heat capacity data it has been suggested that this heterogeneity is the result of kinetic constraints intrinsic to the physics of the pure system (possibly due to topological overprotection), leading to a self-induced glass of valence bonds between neighbouring 4d1 electrons. The muSR relaxation unambiguously points to a static heterogeneous state with a static arrangement of unpaired electrons isolated by spin-singlet (valence bond) dimers between the majority of Mo5+ 4d electrons. The AC susceptibility data indicate that the residual magnetic moments freeze into a dilute-spin-glass-like state. This is in apparent contradiction with the muon-spin decoupling at 50 mK in fields up to 200 mT, which indicates that, remarkably, the time scale of the field fluctuations from the residual moments is ~ 5 ns. Comparable behaviour has been observed in other geometrically frustrated magnets with spin-liquid-like behaviour and the implications of our observations on Ba2YMoO6 are discussed in this context.
We present a large-N variational approach to describe the magnetism of insulating doped semiconductors based on a disorder-generalization of the resonating-valence-bond theory for quantum antiferromagnets. This method captures all the qualitative and even quantitative predictions of the strong-disorder renormalization group approach over the entire experimentally relevant temperature range. Finally, by mapping the problem on a hard-sphere fluid, we could provide an essentially exact analytic solution without any adjustable parameters.
We consider the Edwards-Anderson Ising Spin Glass model for non negative temperatures T: We define the natural notion of Boltzmann- Gibbs measure for the Edwards-Anderson spin glass at a given temperature, and of unsatisfied edges. We prove that for low enough temperatures, in almost every spin configuration the graph formed by the unsatisfied edges is made of finite connected components. In other words, the unsatisfied edges do not percolate.
Follow-up neutron measurements, performed on a sample much larger than the one used in the original study, show that in the energy range 0.5-45 meV the magnetic excitations in BaCu2SiGeO7 are indistinguishable from those in conventional (disorder-free) quantum S=1/2 chains. Scrutinizing the previous data, we found that the analysis was affected by a poorly identified structured background and an additional technical mistake in the data reduction.
Using Monte Carlo simulations, we study the character of the spin-glass (SG) state of a site-diluted dipolar Ising model. We consider systems of dipoles randomly placed on a fraction x of all L^3 sites of a simple cubic lattice that point up or down along a given crystalline axis. For x < 0.65 these systems are known to exhibit an equilibrium spin-glass phase below a temperature T_sg proportional to x. At high dilution and very low temperatures, well deep in the SG phase, we find spiky distributions of the overlap parameter q that are strongly sample-dependent. We focus on spikes associated with large excitations. From cumulative distributions of q and a pair correlation function averaged over several thousands of samples we find that, for the system sizes studied, the average width of spikes, and the fraction of samples with spikes higher than a certain threshold does not vary appreciably with L. This is compared with the behaviour found for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model.
The glass transition in hydrogen-bonded glass formers differs from the glass transition in other glass formers. The Eshelby rearrangements of the highly viscous flow are superimposed by strongly asymmetric hydrogen bond rupture processes, responsible for the excess wing. Their influence on the shear relaxation spectrum is strong in glycerol and close to zero in PPE, reflecting the strength of the hydrogen bond contribution to the high frequency shear modulus. An appropriate modification of a recent theory of the highly viscous flow enables a quantitative common description of the relaxation spectra in shear, linear and non-linear dielectrics, and heat capacity.