TY - JOUR
T1 - Breathing chromium spinels
T2 - a showcase for a variety of pyrochlore Heisenberg Hamiltonians
AU - Ghosh, Pratyay
AU - Iqbal, Yasir
AU - Müller, Tobias
AU - Ponnaganti, Ravi T.
AU - Thomale, Ronny
AU - Narayanan, Rajesh
AU - Reuther, Johannes
AU - Gingras, Michel J.P.
AU - Jeschke, Harald O.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Zenji Hiroi, Gøran Nilsen, Yoshihiko Okamoto, Owen Benton, Hikaru Kawamura, and Jason Gardner for useful discussions. H.O.J. thanks Gøran Nilsen for communicating the T = 20 K internal coordinates of LiInCr4O8. We gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. for funding this project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer SuperMUC at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ). The work in Würzburg is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)-Project-ID 258499086-SFB 1170 and by the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence on Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter—ct.qmat (EXC 2147, project-id 39085490). This research was supported in part by the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) during a visit for participating in the program—The 2nd Asia Pacific Workshop on Quantum Magnetism (Code: ICTS/apfm2018/11). J.R. acknowledges the kind hospitality of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India, where a part of the research was carried out. The work at the University of Waterloo was supported by the Canada Research Chair program (M.J.P.G., Tier 1).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - We address the long-standing problem of the microscopic origin of the richly diverse phenomena in the chromium breathing pyrochlore material family. Combining electronic structure and renormalization group techniques we resolve the magnetic interactions and analyze their reciprocal-space susceptibility. We show that the physics of these materials is principally governed by long-range Heisenberg Hamiltonian interactions, a hitherto unappreciated fact. Our calculations uncover that in these isostructural compounds, the choice of chalcogen triggers a proximity of the materials to classical spin liquids featuring degenerate manifolds of wave-vectors of different dimensions: A Coulomb phase with three-dimensional degeneracy for LiInCr4O8 and LiGaCr4O8, a spiral spin liquid with two-dimensional degeneracy for CuInCr4Se8 and one-dimensional line degeneracies characteristic of the face-centered cubic antiferromagnet for LiInCr4S8, LiGaCr4S8, and CuInCr4S8. The surprisingly complex array of prototypical pyrochlore behaviors we discovered in chromium spinels may inspire studies of transition paths between different semi-classical spin liquids by doping or pressure.
AB - We address the long-standing problem of the microscopic origin of the richly diverse phenomena in the chromium breathing pyrochlore material family. Combining electronic structure and renormalization group techniques we resolve the magnetic interactions and analyze their reciprocal-space susceptibility. We show that the physics of these materials is principally governed by long-range Heisenberg Hamiltonian interactions, a hitherto unappreciated fact. Our calculations uncover that in these isostructural compounds, the choice of chalcogen triggers a proximity of the materials to classical spin liquids featuring degenerate manifolds of wave-vectors of different dimensions: A Coulomb phase with three-dimensional degeneracy for LiInCr4O8 and LiGaCr4O8, a spiral spin liquid with two-dimensional degeneracy for CuInCr4Se8 and one-dimensional line degeneracies characteristic of the face-centered cubic antiferromagnet for LiInCr4S8, LiGaCr4S8, and CuInCr4S8. The surprisingly complex array of prototypical pyrochlore behaviors we discovered in chromium spinels may inspire studies of transition paths between different semi-classical spin liquids by doping or pressure.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41535-019-0202-z
DO - 10.1038/s41535-019-0202-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076891173
SN - 2397-4648
VL - 4
JO - npj Quantum Materials
JF - npj Quantum Materials
IS - 1
M1 - 63
ER -