The delafossite-like compound NaYbO2 hosts a triangular lattice of Yb3+ moments and is a promising candidate for the realization of a quantum spin liquid ground state -- an exotic, quantum-disordered magnetic phase featuring long-range entanglement of spins. Tuning this system away from this quantum-disordered regime toward classical order or spin freezing is a powerful approach to shed light on the nature of the parent ground state. Here we leverage the substitution of nonmagnetic Lu3+ onto the Yb3+ sites to study the effects of magnetic disorder in NaYbO2 using low-temperature ac susceptibility, heat capacity, and muon spin relaxation (μSR) measurements. Our μSR measurements reveal resilient, correlated magnetic fluctuations that persist to at least 15\% dilution, precluding conventional spin freezing and magnetic inhomogeneity. Heat capacity and magnetic susceptibility resolve a rapid suppression of the field-induced ``up-up-down'' magnetic order upon dilution and a crossover in the power-law behavior of the low-temperature magnetic excitations associated with the zero-field quantum disordered ground state. Taken together, these results support the notion of a robust network of entangled moments in NaYbO2, and provides experimental validation of several models of a Heisenberg triangular lattice antiferromagnet in the presence of disorder.
@article{arxiv.2506.22613,
title = {Magnetic dilution in the triangular lattice antiferromagnet NaYb$_{1-x}$Lu$_{x}$O$_2$},
author = {Steven J. Gomez Alvarado and Brenden R. Ortiz and Soren Bear and Benito A. Gonzalez and Andrea N. Capa Salinas and Adam Berlie and Michael J. Graf and Stephen D. Wilson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.22613},
year = {2025}
}