No Arabic abstract
If spin liquids have been famously defined by what they are not, i.e. ordered, the past years have seen the frontier between order and spin liquid starting to fade, with a growing number of materials whose low-temperature physics cannot be explained without co-existence of (partial) magnetic order and spin fluctuations. Here we study an example of such co-existence in the presence of magnetic dipolar interactions, related to spin ice, where the order is long range and the fluctuations support a Coulomb gauge field. Topological defects are effectively coupled via energetic and entropic Coulomb interactions, the latter one being stronger than for the spin-ice ground state. Depending on whether these defects break the divergence-free condition of the Coulomb gauge field or the long-range order, they are respectively categorized as monopoles - as in spin ice - or monopole holes, in analogy with electron holes in semiconductors. The long-range order plays the role of a fully-occupied valence band, while the Coulomb spin liquid can be seen as an empty conducting band. These results are discussed in the context of other lattices and models which support a similar co-existence of Coulomb gauge field and long-range order. We conclude this work by explaining how dipolar interactions lift the spin liquid degeneracy at very low energy scale by maximizing the number of flippable plaquettes, in light of the equivalent quantum dimer model.
Quantum spin liquids host novel emergent excitations, such as monopoles of an emergent gauge field. Here, we study the hierarchy of monopole operators that emerges at quantum critical points (QCPs) between a two-dimensional Dirac spin liquid and various ordered phases. This is described by a confinement transition of quantum electrodynamics in two spatial dimensions (QED3 Gross-Neveu theories). Focusing on a spin ordering transition, we get the scaling dimension of monopoles at leading order in a large-N expansion, where 2N is the number of Dirac fermions, as a function of the monopoles total magnetic spin. Monopoles with a maximal spin have the smallest scaling dimension while monopoles with a vanishing magnetic spin have the largest one, the same as in pure QED3. The organization of monopoles in multiplets of the QCPs symmetry group SU(2) x SU(N) is shown for general N.
The kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet is a leading candidate in the search for a spin system with a quantum spin-liquid ground state. The nature of its ground state remains a matter of great debate. We conducted 17-O single crystal NMR measurements of the S=1/2 kagome lattice in herbertsmithite ZnCu$_3$(OH)$_6$Cl$_2$, which is known to exhibit a spinon continuum in the spin excitation spectrum. We demonstrate that the intrinsic local spin susceptibility $chi_{kagome}$ deduced from the 17-O NMR frequency shift asymptotes to zero below temperature T ~ 0.03 J, where J ~ 200 K is the Cu-Cu super-exchange interaction. Combined with the magnetic field dependence of $chi_{kagome}$ we observed at low temperatures, these results imply that the kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet has a spin-liquid ground state with a finite gap.
The ground-state ordering and dynamics of the two-dimensional (2D) S=1/2 frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet Cs_2CuCl_4 is explored using neutron scattering in high magnetic fields. We find that the dynamic correlations show a highly dispersive continuum of excited states, characteristic of the RVB state, arising from pairs of S=1/2 spinons. Quantum renormalization factors for the excitation energies (1.65) and incommensuration (0.56) are large.
We present a study of a simple model antiferromagnet consisting of a sum of nearest neighbor SO($N$) singlet projectors on the Kagome lattice. Our model shares some features with the popular $S=1/2$ Kagome antiferromagnet but is specifically designed to be free of the sign-problem of quantum Monte Carlo. In our numerical analysis, we find as a function of $N$ a quadrupolar magnetic state and a wide range of a quantum spin liquid. A solvable large-$N$ generalization suggests that the quantum spin liquid in our original model is a gapped ${mathbb Z}_2$ topological phase. Supporting this assertion, a numerical study of the entanglement entropy in the sign free model shows a quantized topological contribution.
The two-electron doped rare earth mangnites Ca_1-x Ce_x MnO_3 (x = 0.1,0.2) are probed using resistivity, ac susceptibility and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) measurements across their respective charge ordering (CO) temperatures T_CO = 173 K and 250 K. The EPR g factor and intensity as well as the transport and magnetic behaviours of the two compositions are qualitatively similar and are as expected for CO systems. However, the EPR linewidth, reflective of the spin dynamics, for x = 0.1, shows a strongly anomalous temperature dependence, decreasing with decreasing temperature below T_CO in contrast with the sample with x = 0.2 and other CO systems. Keeping in view the evidence for magnetic frustration in the system, we propose that the anomalous temperature dependence of the linewidth is the signature of the occurrence of a disorder driven spin liquid phase, present along with charge ordering.