Local origin of the fluctuating groundstate in an S=1/2 spinel

DOI

Upon cooling, all common liquids are observed to freeze. This observation is similarly ubiquitous for magnetic materials, where the magnetic moments most often line up in a rigid fashion at low temperature. However, in materials with single unpaired electrons, quantum fluctuations may instead induce a fluctuating, 'spin-liquid' ground state. This is most pronounced when the interactions between neighbouring atoms compete. We have characterised one such pyrochlore material, and shown that no spin-freezing occurs. Instead, the local crystallographic symmetry is broken, and the degree of atomic order reduces. Our key objective with this proposal is to perform neutron total scattering experiments to identify the local distortions. This will determine if a dimensional reduction to a dimerised or tetramer ground state prevents spin-order, and explain the unusual dynamic ground state.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB1910560-1
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/103218355
Provenance
Creator Dr Christian Balz; Dr Simon Kimber; Professor Paul Henry; Miss Siham Mouhtadi; Mr Daniel Szczerba
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2022
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 Natural Sciences; Physics
Temporal Coverage Begin 2019-06-17T07:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2019-06-20T15:50:26Z