Condensed-Matter Physics & Materials Science Seminar

Insulating magnets combining the effects of geometrical frustration with strong spin-orbit coupling offer a prime route to realize correlated quantum states with exotic ground-states and excitations. Spin-space anisotropy and bond-directional magnetic exchange interactions are naturally present in rare-earth oxides. One of the most celebrated consequence is the existence of classical and quantum "spin-ice" physics in rare-earth pyrochlores, materials in which magnetic ions occupy a three-dimensional network of corner-sharing tetrahedra. In this talk, I will present the discovery of distinct flavors of exotic magnetic matter in families of rare-earth oxides with two-dimensional kagome [1] and triangular [2] geometries. This experimental work relies on recent advances in materials synthesis and combines thermodynamic characterization with state-of-the-art neutron scattering experiments to unravel the classical or quantum nature of these newly discovered quasi-two-dimensional spin-liquids.


[1] Emergent order in the kagome Ising magnet Dy3Mg2Sb3O14, J. A. M. Paddison, H. S. Ong, J. O. Hamp, P. Mukherjee, X. Bai, M. G. Tucker, N. P. Butch, C. Castelnovo, M. Mourigal, and S. E. Dutton, Nature Communications 7, 13842 (2016).

[2] Continuous excitations of the triangular-lattice quantum spin liquid YbMgGaO4, J. A. M. Paddison, M. Daum, Z. L. Dun, G. Ehlers, Y. Liu, M. B. Stone, H. D. Zhou, and M. Mourigal, Nature Physics AOP (2016).