Loughborough University
Browse

Classical Spin Liquid Instability Driven By Off-Diagonal Exchange in Strong Spin-Orbit Magnets

Download (2.59 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2018-07-03, 12:50 authored by Ioannis RousochatzakisIoannis Rousochatzakis, Natalia B. Perkins
© 2017 American Physical Society. We show that the off-diagonal exchange anisotropy drives Mott insulators with strong spin-orbit coupling to a classical spin liquid regime, characterized by an infinite number of ground states and Ising variables living on closed or open strings. Depending on the sign of the anisotropy, quantum fluctuations either fail to lift the degeneracy down to very low temperatures, or select noncoplanar magnetic states with unconventional spin correlations. The results apply to all 2D and 3D tricoordinated materials with bond-directional anisotropy and provide a consistent interpretation of the suppression of the x-ray magnetic circular dichroism signal reported recently for β-Li2IrO3 under pressure.

Funding

This work was supported by NSF Grant No. DMR-1511768. NP acknowledges the support of NSF GRANT No. PHY-1066293.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Physics

Published in

Physical Review Letters

Volume

118

Issue

14

Citation

ROUSOCHATZAKIS, I. and PERKINS, N.B., 2017. Classical spin liquid instability driven by off-diagonal exchange in strong spin-orbit magnets. Physical Review Letters, 118: 147204.

Publisher

© American Physical Society

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-03-02

Publication date

2017-04-05

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.147204

ISSN

0031-9007

eISSN

1079-7114

Language

  • en

Article number

147204

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC