Fractionalized excitations in the spin-liquid state of a kagome-lattice antiferromagnet
By T. Han, J. Helton, S. Chu, D. Nocera, J. Rodriguez-Rivera, C. Broholm, Young S. Lee. Nature, 2012
1,014 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The experimental realization of quantum spin liquids is a long-sought goal in physics, as they represent new states of matter. Quantum spin liquids cannot be described by the broken symmetries associated with conventional ground states. In fact, the interacting magnetic moments in these systems do not order, but are highly entangled with one another over long ranges. Spin liquids have a prominent role in theories describing high-transition-temperature superconductors, and the topological properties of these states may have applications in quantum information. A key feature of spin liquids is that they support exotic spin excitations carrying fractional quantum numbers. However, detailed measurements of these ‘fractionalized excitations’ have been lacking. Here we report neutron scattering measurements on single-crystal samples of the spin-1/2 kagome-lattice antiferromagnet ZnCu3(OD)6Cl2 (also called herbertsmithite), which provide striking evidence for this characteristic feature of spin liquids. At low temperatures, we find that the spin excitations form a continuum, in contrast to the conventional spin waves expected in ordered antiferromagnets. The observation of such a continuum is noteworthy because, so far, this signature of fractional spin excitations has been observed only in one-dimensional systems. The results also serve as a hallmark of the quantum spin-liquid state in herbertsmithite.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bc5f9e4d8adc37cb7e3718d016ecb733e2babc2
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Citations in the corpus
- The physics of quantum materials (2017, background): “…Z 2 spin liquid, appears in quantum dimer models 111 , which are intended to capture the singlet correlations relevant to cuprate superconductors, and a spin liquid of this type may appear in the nearest-neighbour Heisenberg model on the kagome lattice as possibly realized in herbertsmithite 112 .”
- Physical realization of a quantum spin liquid based on a complex frustration mechanism (2016, background): “Among the many proposed physical realizations of the kagome, the best candidate is the mineral Herbertsmithite which has recently been verified as a quantum spin liquid by the absence of static long-range magnetic order and the presence of spinon excitations [26].”
- Three-state nematicity and magneto-optical Kerr effect in the charge density waves in kagome superconductors (2022, methodology): “The data points are the fitted values of θK obtained using Equation (1).”
- Quantum spin liquids (2019, background): “This has allowed for single-crystal neutron scattering studies that have revealed a broad continuum of spin excitations (91) (Fig.”
- Geometry of quantum phase transitions (2019, background): “The dynamical susceptibility is a well studied quantity which has been observed experimentally in a wide variety of materials [339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344].”
- Expanding frontiers in materials chemistry and physics with multiple anions (2018, background): “(bottom) A spin liquid ground state and inelastic neutron scattering on ZnCu3(OH)6Cl2 showing fractionalized excitations.(85) c, (upper) Crystal and electronic structures of SrVO2H with trans-VO4H2 octahedra.”
- Massive Dirac fermions in a ferromagnetic kagome metal (2017, background): “Kagome magnetic systems have been successfully studied in electrically insulating compounds such as jarosite [3], volborthite [4], and herbertsmithite [6].”
- Antiferromagnetic spintronics (2016, background): “, 2000; Giamarchi, Rüegg, and Tchernyshyov, 2008), or spin liquid phases in antiferromagnetic kagome lattices (Han et al., 2012).”