Spin-Lattice Coupling in Frustrated Antiferromagnets
By O. Tchernyshyov, Gia-Wei Chern. 2009
819 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We review the mechanism of spin-lattice coupling in relieving the geometrical frustration of pyrochlore antiferromagnets, in particular spinel oxides. The tetrahedral unit, which is the building block of the pyrochlore lattice, undergoes a spin-driven Jahn–Teller instability when lattice degrees of freedom are coupled to the antiferromagnetism. By restricting our considerations to distortions which preserve the translational symmetries of the lattice, we present a general theory of the collective spin–Jahn–Teller effect in the pyrochlore lattice. One of the predicted lattice distortions breaks the inversion symmetry and gives rise to a chiral pyrochlore lattice, in which frustrated bonds form helices with a definite handedness. The chirality is transferred to the spin system through spin-orbit coupling, resulting in a long-period spiral state, as observed in spinel CdCr2O4. We discuss explicit models of spin-lattice coupling using local phonon modes, and their applications in other frustrated magnets.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/471c70b7f9b0cc8222b8101aec1ec48c15769d5e
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In Condensed Matter Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Quantum spin liquid states (2016, background): “Several excellent reviews are available on QSLs (Balents, 2010; Lee, 2008a) and frustrated magnetism (Diep, 2004; Lacroix et al., 2011).”
- Exotic electronic states in the world of flat bands: From theory to material (2014, background): “Theoretically, it is worth exploring other possibilities in the FB, such as higher Chern numbers,[68–70] other classes of topologies,[71,72] and higher dimensions.”
- A Field Guide to Spin Liquids (2018, background): “magnetism more generally (23); discussions of spin ice (24); introductory reviews of QSLs (4, 25–27); an overview over spin ice (28) and Kitaev QSLs (29) from a fractionalization perspective, as well as a nice review of classical emergent Coulomb gauge fields (30); and works focusing on the material”
- Physics of the Kitaev Model: Fractionalization, Dynamic Correlations, and Material Connections (2017, background): “[4] Claudine Lacroix, Philippe Mendels, and Frédéric Mila, editors.”