No Arabic abstract
Motivated by the absence of both spin freezing and a cooperative Jahn-Teller effect at the lowest measured temperatures, we study the ground state of Ba3CuSb2O9. We solve a general spin-orbital model on both the honeycomb and the decorated honeycomb lattice, revealing rich phase diagrams. The spin-orbital model on the honeycomb lattice contains an SU(4) point, where previous studies have shown the existence of a spin-orbital liquid with algebraically decaying correlations. For realistic parameters on the decorated honeycomb lattice, we find a phase that consists of clusters of nearest-neighbour spin singlets, which can be understood in terms of dimer coverings of an emergent square lattice. While the experimental situation is complicated by structural disorder, we show qualitative agreement between our theory and a range of experiments.
We present local probe results on the honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet Ba3CuSb2O9. Muon spin relaxation measurements in zero field down to 20 mK show unequivocally that there is a total absence of spin freezing in the ground state. Sb NMR measurements allow us to track the intrinsic susceptibility of the lattice, which shows a maximum at around 55 K and drops to zero in the low-temperature limit. The spin-lattice relaxation rate shows two characteristic energy scales, including a field-dependent crossover to exponential low-temperature behavior, implying gapped magnetic excitations.
In order to understand the properties of Mott insulators with strong ground state orbital fluctuations, we study the zero temperature properties of the SU(4) spin-orbital model on a square lattice. Exact diagonalizations of finite clusters suggest that the ground state is disordered with a singlet-multiplet gap and possibly low-lying SU(4) singlets in the gap. An interpretation in terms of plaquette SU(4) singlets is proposed. The implications for LiNiO_2 are discussed.
We have successfully determined the hitherto unknown sign of the B44 Stevens crystal-field parameter of the tetragonal heavy-fermion compound CeCu2Si2 using vector q dependent non-resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (NIXS) experiments at the cerium N4,5 edge. The observed difference between the two different directions q||[100] and q||[110] is due to the anisotropy of the crystal-field ground state in the (001) plane and is observable only because of the utilization of higher than dipole transitions possible in NIXS. This approach allows us to go beyond the specific limitations of dc magnetic susceptibility, inelastic neutron scattering, and soft x-ray spectroscopy, and provides us with a reliable information about the orbital state of the 4f electrons relevant for the quantitative modeling of the quasi-particles and their interactions in heavy-fermion systems.
Ground state properties of multi-orbital Hubbard models are investigated by the auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo method. A Monte Carlo technique generalized to the multi-orbital systems is introduced and examined in detail. The algorithm contains non-trivial cases where the negative sign problem does not exist. We investigate one-dimensional systems with doubly degenerate orbitals by this new technique. Properties of the Mott insulating state are quantitatively clarified as the strongly correlated insulator, where the charge gap amplitude is much larger than the spin gap. The insulator-metal transitions driven by the chemical potential shows a universality class with the correlation length exponent $ u=1/2$, which is consistent with the scaling arguments. Increasing level split between two orbitals drives crossover from the Mott insulator with high spin state to the band insulator with low spin state, where the spin gap amplitude increases and becomes closer to the charge gap. Experimental relevance of our results especially to Haldane materials is discussed.
We investigate the ground state magnetization plateaus appearing in spin 1/2 polymerized Heisenberg chains under external magnetic fields. The associated fractional quantization scenario and the exponents which characterize the opening of gapful excitations are analyzed by means of abelian bosonization methods. Our conclusions are fully supported by the extrapolated results obtained from Lanczos diagonalizations of finite systems.