English

Consequences of spin-orbit coupling for the Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2007-05-23 v2

Abstract

In the first part we discuss how the BEC picture for magnons is modified by anisotropies induced by spin-orbit coupling. In particular we focus on the effects of antisymmetric spin interactions and/or a staggered component of the gg (gyromagnetic) tensor. Such terms lead to a gapped quasiparticle spectrum and a nonzero condensate density for all temperatures so that no phase transition occurs. We contrast this to the effect of crystal field anisotropies which are also induced by spin-orbit coupling. In the second part we study the field-induced magnetic ordering in TlCuCl3_3 on a quantitative level. We show that the usual BEC picture does not allow for a good description of the experimental magnetisation data and argue that antisymmetric spin interactions and/or a staggered gg tensor component are still crucial, although both are expected to be tiny in this compound due to crystal symmetries. Including this type of interaction we obtain excellent agreement with experimental data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0403311,
  title  = {Consequences of spin-orbit coupling for the Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons},
  author = {J. Sirker and A. Weiße and O. P. Sushkov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0403311},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2 figures, section discussing BEC in TlCuCl3 extended; Europhysics Letters in print