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A22: Frustrated Magnetism: Classical Spin Liquids and Beyond

101B

Sponsoring Units: GMAGChair: Vivien Zapf, Los Alamos Natl LabSession Tags:
  • Focus

Mon. March 4, 8:48 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. CST

101B

Spiral spin liquids (SSLs) are frustration-enabled correlated states of matter in which a magnetic system evades order by fluctuating between (nearly) degenerate spin spirals whose ordering wave vectors span a contour or surface in momentum space. Apart from being of interest in and of themselves, SSLs are also recognized as promising routes toward other exotic phenomena in the presence of perturbations. For instance, they have been proposed as classical precursors to quantum spin liquids and shown to give way to multi-Q states and skyrmion lattices in magnetic fields. Here, by considering a prototypical honeycomb-lattice Heisenberg model, we investigate the response of SSLs to quenched disorder. At the single-impurity level, we identify different order-by-quenched-disorder (ObQD) mechanisms and analyze the ensuing spin textures. In particular, we show that the latter generally display Friedel-like oscillations, which encode direct information about the spiral contour. At finite defect concentrations, we perform extensive numerical simulations and characterize the resulting phases at zero temperature. As a result, we find that the competition between incompatible ObQD mechanisms can lead to "spiral spin-glass" states already at low to moderate disorder. Finally, we discuss extensions of our conclusions to nonzero temperatures and higher-dimensional systems, as well as their applications to experiments.

Presented By

  • Pedro M Cônsoli (Technische Universität Dresden)

Authors

  • Pedro M Cônsoli (Technische Universität Dresden)
  • Matthias Vojta (Technische Universität Dresden)