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Crystallography-driven molecularization of a two-dimensional spin-$3/2$ magnet

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2026-02-27 v2 Materials Science

Abstract

Large-spin two-dimensional magnets are generally expected to develop conventional long-range order once the dominant exchange scale becomes appreciable. The layered spin-3/23/2 maple-leaf compound Na2_2Mn3_3O7_7 defies this expectation: despite sizable antiferromagnetic interactions and no evident disorder, it exhibits no magnetic ordering and displays two well-separated thermodynamic crossover scales. We show that this behavior originates from a crystallography-driven molecularization of the magnetic degrees of freedom. The low-symmetry structure partitions the Mn sublattice into inequivalent exchange pathways, generating a pronounced hierarchy that nearly isolates antiferromagnetic hexagons. Magnetic correlations therefore develop in two stages: first within individual hexagons at a scale set by the dominant exchange, and only at much lower temperatures do frustrated inter-hexagon couplings attempt to establish coherence across the lattice. While isolated hexagons reproduce the two-step thermodynamic structure, the experimentally relevant temperature scales emerge only once the hexagons are embedded in the frustrated two-dimensional network. The resulting quantum ground state is magnetically disordered, characterized by strong intra-hexagon correlations and rapidly decaying inter-hexagon correlations. These results identify crystallographic inequivalence as a materials-level mechanism for stabilizing molecularized and quantum-disordered states even in large-spin two-dimensional magnets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.22005,
  title  = {Crystallography-driven molecularization of a two-dimensional spin-$3/2$ magnet},
  author = {Hari Borutta and Tobias Müller and Ronny Thomale and Harald O. Jeschke and Yasir Iqbal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22005},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

11 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, and Supplementary Material

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:52:14.386Z