5 research outputs found
Observation of plaquette fluctuations in the spin-1/2 honeycomb lattice
Quantum spin liquids are materials that feature quantum entangled spin
correlations and avoid magnetic long-range order at T = 0 K. Particularly
interesting are two-dimensional honeycomb spin lattices where a plethora of
exotic quantum spin liquids have been predicted. Here, we experimentally study
an effective S=1/2 Heisenberg honeycomb lattice with competing nearest and
next-nearest neighbor interactions. We demonstrate that YbBr avoids order
down to at least T=100 mK and features a dynamic spin-spin correlation function
with broad continuum scattering typical of quantum spin liquids near a quantum
critical point. The continuum in the spin spectrum is consistent with plaquette
type fluctuations predicted by theory. Our study is the experimental
demonstration that strong quantum fluctuations can exist on the honeycomb
lattice even in the absence of Kitaev-type interactions, and opens a new
perspective on quantum spin liquids.Comment: 32 pages, 7 Figure
Magnetic field dependence of excitations near spin-orbital quantum criticality
The spinel FeSc2S4 has been proposed to realize a near-critical spin-orbital singlet (SOS) state, where entangled spin and orbital moments fluctuate in a global singlet state on the verge of spin and orbital order. Here we report powder inelastic neutron scattering measurements that observe the full bandwidth of magnetic excitations and we find that spin-orbital triplon excitations of an SOS state can capture well key aspects of the spectrum in both zero and applied magnetic fields up to 8.5 T. The observed shift of low-energy spectral weight to higher energies upon increasing applied field is naturally explained by the entangled spin-orbital character of the magnetic states, a behavior that is in strong contrast to spin-only singlet ground state systems, where the spin gap decreases upon increasing applied field.</p
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URN 96/6134/P. Includes 2 floppy disksAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:V96/28296 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo