English

Lack of Evidence for a Singlet Crystal Field Ground State in the Tb2Ti2O7 Magnetic Pyrochlore

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2012-10-11 v1 Other Condensed Matter

Abstract

We present new high resolution inelastic neutron scattering data on the candidate spin liquid Tb2Ti2O7. We find that there is no evidence for a zero field splitting of the ground state doublet within the 0.2 K resolution of the instrument. This result contrasts with a pair of recent works on Tb2Ti2O7 claiming that the spin liquid behavior can be attributed to a 2 K split singlet-singlet single-ion spectrum at low energies. We also reconsider the entropy argument presented in Chapuis {\it et al.} as further evidence of a singlet-singlet crystal field spectrum. We arrive at the conclusion that estimates of the low temperature residual entropy drawn from heat capacity measurements are a poor guide to the single ion spectrum without understanding the nature of the correlations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1106.1402,
  title  = {Lack of Evidence for a Singlet Crystal Field Ground State in the Tb2Ti2O7 Magnetic Pyrochlore},
  author = {B. D. Gaulin and J. S. Gardner and P. A. McClarty and M. J. P. Gingras},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.1402},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figure. Submitted to Physical Review B