24-spin clusters in the mineral boleite: correlations in spin-liquid droplets?

DOI

The crystal structure of the mineral boleite contains Cu2+ ions (each with S=1/2) forming truncated cube clusters of linked triangles. Susceptibility, neutron scattering and exact diagonalization calculations suggest that effective S=1/2 degrees of freedom emerge on the triangles, followed by condensation of these into a singlet state at lower temperature. We hypothesize that the resulting cube of effective S=1/2 degrees of freedom is a fragment of the full S=1/2 dimer problem on the cubic lattice, where a spin liquid groundstate exists. The clusters in boleite afford an intermediate situation, accessible to both experiment and exact diagonalization, in which a spin liquid "droplet" can be studied. Here we propose to characterize the wavevector and temperature dependence of the spin correlations.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5291/ILL-DATA.5-42-379
Metadata Access https://data.ill.fr/openaire/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=10.5291/ILL-DATA.5-42-379
Provenance
Creator Nilsen, Goran; Lefmann, Kim; Holm-Dahlin, Sonja; Fennell, Tom
Publisher Institut Laue-Langevin
Publication Year 2014
Rights OpenAccess; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Size 11 GB
Version 1
Discipline Particles, Nuclei and Fields