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The effect of spin-orbit coupling on the effective-spin correlation in YbMgGaO4

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2018-03-14 v2 Materials Science

Abstract

Motivated by the recent experiments on the triangular lattice spin liquid YbMgGaO4_4, we explore the effect of spin-orbit coupling on the effective-spin correlation of the Yb local moments. We point out the anisotropic interaction between the effective-spins on the nearest neighbor bonds is sufficient to reproduce the spin-wave dispersion of the fully polarized state in the presence of strong magnetic field normal to the triangular plane. We further evaluate the effective-spin correlation within the mean-field spherical approximation. We explicitly demonstrate that, the nearest-neighbor anisotropic effective-spin interaction, originating from the strong spin-orbit coupling, enhances the effective-spin correlation at the M points in the Brillouin zone. We identify these results as the strong evidence for the anisotropic interaction and the strong spin-orbit coupling in YbMgGaO4_4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.06445,
  title  = {The effect of spin-orbit coupling on the effective-spin correlation in YbMgGaO4},
  author = {Yao-Dong Li and Yao Shen and Yuesheng Li and Jun Zhao and Gang Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.06445},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

6+epsilon pages, 3 figures. This paper will not be published anywhere until the relevant experimental works that we used are accepted. Update acknowledgements