High-energy excitations in a spin orbital liquid on the diamond lattice

DOI

This proposal is part of our research programme on spin and orbital order in frustrated systems. The spinel FeSc2S4 realises an exotic ¿spin-orbital liquid¿ with no magnetic or orbital order down to mK temperatures, in spite of strong inter-site interactions. Fe2+ ions located on a diamond lattice have both a spin and an unquenched orbital degree of freedom, and in the absence of spin-orbit coupling one would expect both magnetic and Jahn-Teller orbital order. The absence of both orders points to the importance of spin-orbit coupling in stabilizing this unusual state. We have a high-purity powder sample of FeSc2S4 and here we propose to use the high-flux Merlin spectrometer to measure via neutron scattering the full spectrum of energy levels of the Fe2+ ions stabilized by the spin-orbit coupling and local crystal field to find all relevant terms in the microscopic Hamiltonian.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.24086034
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/24086034
Provenance
Creator Professor Christian Ruegg; Professor Radu Coldea; Dr Alun Biffin
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2014
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Photon- and Neutron Geosciences
Temporal Coverage Begin 2011-06-04T07:28:21Z
Temporal Coverage End 2011-06-10T19:48:49Z