309 research outputs found
Observation of magnetic fragmentation in spin ice
Fractionalised excitations that emerge from a many body system have revealed
rich physics and concepts, from composite fermions in two-dimensional electron
systems, revealed through the fractional quantum Hall effect, to spinons in
antiferromagnetic chains and, more recently, fractionalisation of Dirac
electrons in graphene and magnetic monopoles in spin ice. Even more surprising
is the fragmentation of the degrees of freedom themselves, leading to
coexisting and a priori independent ground states. This puzzling phenomenon was
recently put forward in the context of spin ice, in which the magnetic moment
field can fragment, resulting in a dual ground state consisting of a
fluctuating spin liquid, a so-called Coulomb phase, on top of a magnetic
monopole crystal. Here we show, by means of neutron scattering measurements,
that such fragmentation occurs in the spin ice candidate NdZrO. We
observe the spectacular coexistence of an antiferromagnetic order induced by
the monopole crystallisation and a fluctuating state with ferromagnetic
correlations. Experimentally, this fragmentation manifests itself via the
superposition of magnetic Bragg peaks, characteristic of the ordered phase, and
a pinch point pattern, characteristic of the Coulomb phase. These results
highlight the relevance of the fragmentation concept to describe the physics of
systems that are simultaneously ordered and fluctuating.Comment: accepted in Nature Physic
StepFormer: Self-supervised Step Discovery and Localization in Instructional Videos
Instructional videos are an important resource to learn procedural tasks from
human demonstrations. However, the instruction steps in such videos are
typically short and sparse, with most of the video being irrelevant to the
procedure. This motivates the need to temporally localize the instruction steps
in such videos, i.e. the task called key-step localization. Traditional methods
for key-step localization require video-level human annotations and thus do not
scale to large datasets. In this work, we tackle the problem with no human
supervision and introduce StepFormer, a self-supervised model that discovers
and localizes instruction steps in a video. StepFormer is a transformer decoder
that attends to the video with learnable queries, and produces a sequence of
slots capturing the key-steps in the video. We train our system on a large
dataset of instructional videos, using their automatically-generated subtitles
as the only source of supervision. In particular, we supervise our system with
a sequence of text narrations using an order-aware loss function that filters
out irrelevant phrases. We show that our model outperforms all previous
unsupervised and weakly-supervised approaches on step detection and
localization by a large margin on three challenging benchmarks. Moreover, our
model demonstrates an emergent property to solve zero-shot multi-step
localization and outperforms all relevant baselines at this task.Comment: CVPR'2
Spin correlations and exchange in square lattice frustrated ferromagnets
The J1-J2 model on a square lattice exhibits a rich variety of different
forms of magnetic order that depend sensitively on the ratio of exchange
constants J2/J1. We use bulk magnetometry and polarized neutron scattering to
determine J1 and J2 unambiguously for two materials in a new family of vanadium
phosphates, Pb2VO(PO4)2 and SrZnVO(PO4)2, and we find that they have
ferromagnetic J1. The ordered moment in the collinear antiferromagnetic ground
state is reduced, and the diffuse magnetic scattering is enhanced, as the
predicted bond-nematic region of the phase diagram is approached.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
The magnetic dynamics of NiPS
Neutron spectroscopy measurements have been performed on single crystals of
the antiferromagnetic van der Waals compound NiPS. Linear spin wave theory
using a Heisenberg Hamiltonian with single-ion anisotropies has been applied to
determine the magnetic exchange parameters and the nature of the anisotropy.
The analysis reveals that NiPS is less two-dimensional than its sister
compounds, with a relatively large ferromagnetic exchange of meV between the layered \emph{ab} planes. In-plane magnetic exchange
interactions up to the third nearest-neighbour were required to fit the data.
The nearest-neighbour exchange was ferromagnetic with meV, the
second neighbour was antiferromagnetic and small with meV, and the
dominant antiferromagnetic third neighbour exchange was meV. The
anisotropy was shown to be largely XY-like with a small uniaxial component,
leading to the appearance of two low-energy spin wave modes in the spin wave
spectrum at the Brillouin zone centre. The analysis could reproduce the spin
wave energies, however there are discrepancies with the calculated neutron
intensities hinting at more exotic phenomena.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 33 reference
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