Breakdown of magnons in a strongly spin-orbital coupled magnet
- The description of quantized collective excitations stands as a landmark in the quantum theory of condensed matter. A prominent example occurs in conventional magnets, which support bosonic magnons—quantized harmonic fluctuations of the ordered spins. In striking contrast is the recent discovery that strongly spin-orbital-coupled magnets, such as α-RuCl3, may display a broad excitation continuum inconsistent with conventional magnons. Due to incomplete knowledge of the underlying interactions unraveling the nature of this continuum remains challenging. The most discussed explanation refers to a coherent continuum of fractional excitations analogous to the celebrated Kitaev spin liquid. Here, we present a more general scenario. We propose that the observed continuum represents incoherent excitations originating from strong magnetic anharmonicity that naturally occurs in such materials. This scenario fully explains the observed inelastic magnetic response of α-RuCl3 and reveals the presence of nontrivial excitations in such materials extending well beyond the Kitaev state.
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| Author: | Stephen M. WinterORCiD, Kira Marina RiedlORCiDGND, Pavel A. Maksimov, Alexander L. Chernyshev, Andreas Honecker, Roser ValentíORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-459423 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01177-0 |
| ISSN: | 2041-1723 |
| ArXiv Id: | http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08466 |
| Pubmed Id: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29074965 |
| Parent Title (English): | Nature Communications |
| Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group UK |
| Place of publication: | [London] |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2017 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2017/10/27 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2018/04/26 |
| Tag: | Magnetic properties and materials; Theoretical physics |
| Volume: | 8 |
| Issue: | 1, Art. 1152 |
| Page Number: | 8 |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 8 |
| Note: | Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 432787755 |
| Institutes: | Physik / Physik |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 53 Physik / 530 Physik |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Open-Access-Publikationsfonds: | Physik |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |
