Speaker
Description
At very low temperatures, theoretically down to 0 K, the unpaired electronic spins on magnetic ions arranged in “frustrated” topologies such as triangles have difficulty finding long-range ordered ground states. This ideally leads to a Kitaev quantum spin-liquid (QSL) state in which the spins continue to fluctuate so the compound has finite entropy at absolute zero. QSL compounds have been intensively studied by the condensed-matter physics community, mostly from theoretical/computational perspectives because there are so few experimental realisations. This presentation will focus on partial spin liquids, in which some of the spins resolve into long-range order but others do not. These have attracted much less theoretical interest than full QSLs, but may be more common in the real world. It will highlight examples from our own work and reported cases that have languished in the literature for want of a unified way to describe them. It will include some crystal-chemical design principles, physical properties, and means to study their complex magnetic structures such as polarised neutron total-scattering and inelastic neutron spectroscopy combined with ab initio computational modelling.
| Field of Condensed Matter | Magnetism |
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