Chiral Spin-Liquid-Like State in Pyrochlore Iridate Thin Films
Abstract
The pyrochlore iridates have become ideal platforms to unravel fascinating correlated and topolog?ical phenomena that stem from the intricate interplay among strong spin-orbit coupling, electronic correlations, lattice with geometric frustration, and itinerancy of the 5d electrons. The all-in-all?out antiferromagnetic state, commonly considered as the magnetic ground state, can be dramatically altered in reduced dimensionality, leading to exotic or hidden quantum states inaccessible in bulk. Here, by means of magnetotransport, resonant elastic and inelastic x-ray scattering experiments, we discover an emergent quantum disordered state in (111) Y2Ir2O7 thin films (thickness less than 30 nm) per?sisting down to 5 K, characterized by dispersionless magnetic excitations. The anomalous Hall effect observed below an onset temperature near 135 K corroborates the presence of chiral short-range spin configurations expressed in non-zero scalar spin chirality, breaking the macroscopic time-reversal symmetry. The origin of this chiral state is ascribed to the restoration of magnetic frustration on the pyrochlore lattice in lower dimensionality, where the competing exchange interactions together with enhanced quantum fluctuations suppress any long-range order and trigger spin-liquid-like behavior with degenerate ground-state manifold.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2403.06170,
title = {Chiral Spin-Liquid-Like State in Pyrochlore Iridate Thin Films},
author = {Xiaoran Liu and Jong-Woo Kim and Yao Wang and Michael Terilli and Xun Jia and Mikhail Kareev and Shiyu Peng and Fangdi Wen and Tsung-Chi Wu and Huyongqing Chen and Wanzheng Hu and Mary H. Upton and Jungho Kim and Yongseong Choi and Daniel Haskel and Hongming Weng and Philip J. Ryan and Yue Cao and Yang Qi and Jiandong Guo and Jak Chakhalian},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.06170},
year = {2024}
}