Continuous excitations of the triangular-lattice quantum spin liquid YbMgGaO4
By J. Paddison, Marcus Daum, Z. Dun, G. Ehlers, Yaohua Liu, M. Stone, Haidong Zhou, M. Mourigal. Nature Physics, 2016
407 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A detailed and systematic neutron-scattering study uncovers a continuum of magnetic excitations down to 0.06 K in the triangular quantum magnet YbMgGaO4 — an observation consistent with quantum spin liquid behaviour. A quantum spin liquid (QSL) is an exotic state of matter in which electrons’ spins are quantum entangled over long distances, but do not show magnetic order in the zero-temperature limit1. The observation of QSL states is a central aim of experimental physics, because they host collective excitations that transcend our knowledge of quantum matter; however, examples in real materials are scarce2. Here, we report neutron-scattering experiments on YbMgGaO4, a QSL candidate in which Yb3+ ions with effective spin-1/2 occupy a triangular lattice3,4,5,6. Our measurements reveal a continuum of magnetic excitations—the essential experimental hallmark of a QSL7—at very low temperature (0.06 K). The origin of this peculiar excitation spectrum is a crucial question, because isotropic nearest-neighbour interactions do not yield a QSL ground state on the triangular lattice8. Using measurements in the field-polarized state, we identify antiferromagnetic next-nearest-neighbour interactions9,10,11,12, spin-space anisotropies4,10,13,14, and chemical disorder15 between the magnetic layers as key ingredients in YbMgGaO4.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b5155023226ac6fcf691a8cce94b97601ae9f66
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Citations in the corpus
- Valence Bonds in Random Quantum Magnets: Theory and Application to YbMgGaO4 (2017, background): “The question of the exact form of the Hamiltonian has not been fully settled [5,8,11,14,173].”
- Rare-Earth Chalcogenides: A Large Family of Triangular Lattice Spin Liquid Candidates (2018, unknown): “The small exchange coupling allows an easy tunability of the spin state with a laboratory magnetic field [33, 37, 39, 44].”