期刊
PHYSICAL REVIEW B
卷 93, 期 21, 页码 -出版社
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.93.214426
关键词
-
资金
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Basic Energy Sciences
- Scientific User Facilities Division
- Materials Science and Engineering Division
- Wigner Fellowship program at ORNL
- NSERC of Canada
We have performed inelastic neutron scattering (INS) experiments to investigate the magnetic excitations in the weakly distorted face-centered-cubic (fcc) iridate double perovskites La2ZnIrO6 and La2MgIrO6, which are characterized by A-type antiferromagnetic ground states. The powder inelastic neutron scattering data on these geometrically frustrated j(eff) = 1/2 Mott insulators provide clear evidence for gapped spin-wave excitations with very weak dispersion. The INS results and thermodynamic data on these materials can be reproduced by conventional Heisenberg-Ising models with significant uniaxial Ising anisotropy and sizeable second-neighbor ferromagnetic interactions. Such a uniaxial Ising exchange interaction is symmetry forbidden on the ideal fcc lattice, so that it can only arise from the weak crystal distortions away from the ideal fcc limit. This may suggest that even weak distortions in j(eff) = 1/2 Mott insulators might lead to strong exchange anisotropies. More tantalizingly, however, we find an alternative viable explanation of the INS results in terms of spin models with a dominant Kitaev interaction. In contrast to the uniaxial Ising exchange, the highly directional Kitaev interaction is a type of exchange anisotropy which is symmetry allowed even on the ideal fcc lattice. The Kitaev model has a magnon gap induced by quantum order by disorder, while weak anisotropies of the Kitaev couplings generated by the symmetry lowering due to lattice distortions can pin the order and enhance the magnon gap. Our findings highlight how even conventional magnetic orders in heavy transition metal oxides may be driven by highly directional exchange interactions rooted in strong spin-orbit coupling.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据