Quantum oscillations of nitrogen atoms in uranium nitride

The vibrational excitations of crystalline solids corresponding to acoustic or optic one phonon modes appear as sharp features in measurements such as neutron spectroscopy. In contrast, many-phonon excitations generally produce a complicated, weak, and featureless response. Here we present time-of-flight neutron scattering measurements for the binary solid uranium nitride (UN), showing well-defined, equally-spaced, high energy vibrational modes in addition to the usual phonons. The spectrum is that of a single atom, isotropic quantum harmonic oscillator and characterizes independent motions of light nitrogen atoms, each found in an octahedral cage of heavy uranium atoms. This is an unexpected and beautiful experimental realization of one of the fundamental, exactly-solvable problems in quantum mechanics. There are also practical implications, as the oscillator modes must be accounted for in the design of generation IV nuclear reactors that plan to use UN as a fuel.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Nature Communications, supplementary information adde

Proximate Kitaev quantum spin liquid behaviour in a honeycomb magnet.

Quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are topological states of matter exhibiting remarkable properties such as the capacity to protect quantum information from decoherence. Whereas their featureless ground states have precluded their straightforward experimental identification, excited states are more revealing and particularly interesting owing to the emergence of fundamentally new excitations such as Majorana fermions. Ideal probes of these excitations are inelastic neutron scattering experiments. These we report here for a ruthenium-based material, α-RuCl3, continuing a major search (so far concentrated on iridium materials) for realizations of the celebrated Kitaev honeycomb topological QSL. Our measurements confirm the requisite strong spin-orbit coupling and low-temperature magnetic order matching predictions proximate to the QSL. We find stacking faults, inherent to the highly two-dimensional nature of the material, resolve an outstanding puzzle. Crucially, dynamical response measurements above interlayer energy scales are naturally accounted for in terms of deconfinement physics expected for QSLs. Comparing these with recent dynamical calculations involving gauge flux excitations and Majorana fermions of the pure Kitaev model, we propose the excitation spectrum of α-RuCl3 as a prime candidate for fractionalized Kitaev physics.Research using ORNL’s HFIR and SNS facilities was sponsored by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES), Scientific User Facilities Division. A part of the synthesis and the bulk characterization performed at ORNL was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division (C.A.B. and J.-Q.Y.). The work at University of Tennessee was funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s EPiQS Initiative through Grant GBMF4416 (D.G.M. and L.L.). The work at Dresden was in part supported by DFG grant SFB 1143 (J.K. and R.M.), and by a fellowship within the Postdoc-Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (J.K.). D.L.K. is supported by EPSRC Grant No. EP/M007928/1. The collaboration as a whole was supported by the Helmholtz Virtual Institute ‘New States of Matter and their Excitations’ initiative.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat460

Ultralow temperature inductive measurements of YbBiPt

Low frequency magnetic susceptibility measurements have been performed on YbBiPt from 3 to 800 mK. In addition to the known peak at 400 mK, an anomaly exists near 120 mK. The lowest temperature feature arises from a surface phase (e.g. Bi2Pt) and is not a property of the main material. No additional features in the susceptibility are attributed to the bulk material down to the lowest temperature. © 1995

Surprising loss of three-dimensionality in low-energy spin correlations on approaching superconductivity in Fe1+yTe1-xSex

We report inelastic neutron scattering measurements of low-energy (ω10 meV) magnetic excitations in the "11" system Fe1+yTe1-xSex. The spin correlations are two-dimensional (2D) in the superconducting samples at low temperature, but appear much more three-dimensional (3D) when the temperature rises well above Tc∼15 K, with a clear increase of the (dynamic) spin correlation length perpendicular to the Fe planes. This behavior is extremely unusual; typically, the suppression of thermal fluctuations at low temperature would favor the enhancement of 3D correlations, or even ordering, and the reversion to 2D cannot be naturally explained when only the spin degree of freedom is considered. Our results suggest that the low temperature physics in the 11 system, in particular the evolution of low-energy spin excitations towards superconducting pairing, intrinsically involves changes in orbital correlations

Ultralow temperature inductive measurements of YbBiPt

Low frequency magnetic susceptibility measurements have been performed on YbBiPt from 3 to 800 mK. In addition to the known peak at 400 mK, an anomaly exists near 120 mK. The lowest temperature feature arises from a surface phase (e.g. Bi Pt) and is not a property of the main material. No additional features in the susceptibility are attributed to the bulk material down to the lowest temperature. © 1995.

Thermal evolution of antiferromagnetic correlations and tetrahedral bond angles in superconducting FeTe1-x Sex

It has recently been demonstrated that dynamical magnetic correlations measured by neutron scattering in iron chalcogenides can be described with models of short-range correlations characterized by particular choices of four-spin plaquettes, where the appropriate choice changes as the parent material is doped towards superconductivity. Here we apply such models to describe measured maps of magnetic scattering as a function of two-dimensional wave vectors obtained for optimally superconducting crystals of FeTe1-xSex. We show that the characteristic antiferromagnetic wave vector evolves from that of the bicollinear structure found in underdoped chalcogenides (at high temperature) to that associated with the stripe structure of antiferromagnetic iron arsenides (at low temperature); these can both be described with the same local plaquette, but with different interplaquette correlations. While the magnitude of the low-energy magnetic spectral weight is substantial at all temperatures, it actually weakens somewhat at low temperature, where the charge carriers become more itinerant. The observed change in spin correlations is correlated with the dramatic drop in the electronic scattering rate and the growth of the bulk nematic response upon cooling. Finally, we also present powder neutron diffraction results for lattice parameters in FeTe1-xSex indicating that the tetrahedral bond angle tends to increase towards the ideal value upon cooling, in agreement with the increased screening of the crystal field by more itinerant electrons and the correspondingly smaller splitting of the Fe 3d orbitals