Low dimensional quantum magnets are interesting because of the emerging collective behavior arising from strong quantum fluctuations. The one-dimensional (1D) S = 1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet is a paradigmatic example, whose low-energy excitations, known as spinons, carry fractional spin S = 1/2. These fractional modes can be reconfined by the application of a staggered magnetic field. Even though considerable progress has been made in the theoretical understanding of such magnets, experimental realizations of this low-dimensional physics are relatively rare. This is particularly true for rare-earth-based magnets because of the large effective spin anisotropy induced by the combination of strong spin–orbit coupling and crystal field splitting. Here, we demonstrate that the rare-earth perovskite YbAlO3 provides a realization of a quantum spin S = 1/2 chain material exhibiting both quantum critical Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid behavior and spinon confinement–deconfinement transitions in different regions of magnetic field–temperature phase diagram.

Complex behavior poses challenges in extracting models from experiment. An example is spin liquid formation in frustrated magnets like Dy2Ti2O7. Understanding has been hindered by issues including disorder, glass formation, and interpretation of scattering data. Here, we use a novel automated capability to extract model Hamiltonians from data, and to identify different magnetic regimes. This involves training an autoencoder to learn a compressed representation of three-dimensional diffuse scattering, over a wide range of spin Hamiltonians. The autoencoder finds optimal matches according to scattering and heat capacity data and provides confidence intervals. Validation tests indicate that our optimal Hamiltonian accurately predicts temperature and field dependence of both magnetic structure and magnetization, as well as glass formation and irreversibility in Dy2Ti2O7. The autoencoder can also categorize different magnetic behaviors and eliminate background

We study the spin-$S$ Kitaev model in the classical ($S \to \infty$) limit using Monte Carlo simulations combined with semi-classical spin dynamics. We discuss differences and similarities in the dynamical structure factors of the spin-$1/2$ and the classical Kitaev liquids. Interestingly, the low-temperature and low-energy spectrum of the classical model exhibits a finite energy peak, which is the precursor of the one produced by the Majorana modes of the $S=1/2$ model. The classical peak is spectrally narrowed compared to the quantum result and can be explained by magnon excitations within fluctuating one-dimensional manifolds (loops). Hence the difference from the classical limit to the quantum limit can be understood by the fractionalization of magnons propagating in one-dimensional manifolds. Moreover, we show that the momentum space distribution of the low-energy spectral weight of the $S=1/2$ model follows the momentum space distribution of zero modes of the classical model.Comment: 12 pages, 8 Figure

The notion of complex energy landscape underpins the intriguing dynamical behaviors in many complex systems ranging from polymers, to brain activity, to social networks and glass transitions. The spin glass state found in dilute magnetic alloys has been an exceptionally convenient laboratory frame for studying complex dynamics resulting from a hierarchical energy landscape with rugged funnels. Here, we show, by a bulk susceptibility and Monte Carlo simulation study, that densely populated frustrated magnets in a spin jam state exhibit much weaker memory effects than spin glasses, and the characteristic properties can be reproduced by a nonhierarchical landscape with a wide and nearly flat but rough bottom. Our results illustrate that the memory effects can be used to probe different slow dynamics of glassy materials, hence opening a window to explore their distinct energy landscapes. memory | energy landscape | spin jam | spin glass I f the energy landscape of a system resembles a smooth vase with a pointy bottom end, upon cooling the system goes quickly into the lowest energy state, i.e., the global ground state, that is usually associated with crystalline order. If the energy landscape is more complex with many metastable states, i.e., local minima, then cooling may lead the system into local minima resulting in a glassy order. The concept of such energy landscapes has been instrumental in explaining the glassiness that is ubiquitous in a wide range of systems, including atomic clusters (1), structural glasses (2, 3), polymers (4), brain activity (5), and social networks (6). Several different topological types of energy landscapes were proposed to characterize different glassiness and the associated slow dynamics (7,8). For instance, a rugged funnel-shaped landscape shown in Fig. 1A was proposed to understand the physics of biopolymers (9, 10) and dilute magnetic alloys called spin glass (11).Magnetic glass systems (12-16) present a unique opportunity to microscopically study the relation between the energy landscape and low temperature properties. The most studied magnetic glass state is the conventional spin glass realized in dilute magnetic alloys such as CuMn and AuFe. Here, dilute magnetic ions (Mn and Fe) in a nonmagnetic metal interact via the longrange Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction whose magnitude and sign change with distance between the randomly placed magnetic ions (11). The randomness drives the system into the spin glass state below a critical temperature, T f , that is comparable to the mean-field magnetic energy scale, i.e., the absolute value of the Curie-Weiss temperature, jΘ CW j. For instance, for Cu − 2 atomic (at.) % Mn (CuMn2% hereafter), Θ CW = −45 K and T f = 15.5 K. Another distinct glassy state called a spin jam has been recently suggested to appear in densely populated frustrated magnets (17-21). At the mean-field level, these systems are expected to remain in a classical spin liquid down to absolute zero temperature, due to macroscopic classical ground state dege...

Quantum to classical crossover is a fundamental question in dynamics of quantum many-body systems. In frustrated magnets, for example, it is highly non-trivial to describe the crossover from the classical spin liquid with a macroscopically-degenerate ground-state manifold, to the quantum spin liquid phase with fractionalized excitations. This is an important issue as we often encounter the demand for a sharp distinction between the classical and quantum spin liquid behaviors in real materials. Here we take the example of the classical spin liquid in a frustrated magnet with novel bond-dependent interactions to investigate the classical dynamics, and critically compare it with quantum dynamics in the same system. In particular, we focus on signatures in the dynamical spin structure factor. Combining Landau-Lifshitz dynamics simulations and the analytical Martin-Siggia-Rose (MSR) approach, we show that the low energy spectra are described by relaxational dynamics and highly constrained by the zero mode structure of the underlying degenerate classical manifold. Further, the higher energy spectra can be explained by precessional dynamics. Surprisingly, many of these features can also be seen in the dynamical structure factor in the quantum model studied by finite-temperature exact diagonalization. We discuss the implications of these results, and their connection to recent experiments on frustrated magnets with strong spin-orbit coupling. arXiv:1803.00601v2 [cond-mat.stat-mech]

Since the discovery of spin glasses in dilute magnetic systems, their study has been largely focused on understanding randomness and defects as the driving mechanism. The same paradigm has also been applied to explain glassy states found in dense frustrated systems. Recently, however, it has been theoretically suggested that different mechanisms, such as quantum fluctuations and topological features, may induce glassy states in defectfree spin systems, far from the conventional dilute limit. Here we report experimental evidence for existence of a glassy state, which we call a spin jam, in the vicinity of the clean limit of a frustrated magnet, which is insensitive to a low concentration of defects. We have studied the effect of impurities on SrCr 9p Ga 12-9p O 19 [SCGO(p)], a highly frustrated magnet, in which the magnetic Cr 3+ (s = 3/2) ions form a quasi-2D triangular system of bipyramids. Our experimental data show that as the nonmagnetic Ga 3+ impurity concentration is changed, there are two distinct phases of glassiness: an exotic glassy state, which we call a spin jam, for the high magnetic concentration region (p > 0.8) and a cluster spin glass for lower magnetic concentration (p < 0.8). This observation indicates that a spin jam is a unique vantage point from which the class of glassy states of dense frustrated magnets can be understood.spin jam | frustration | glassy states U nderstanding glassy states found in dense frustrated magnets has been an intellectual challenge since peculiar low-temperature glassy behaviors were observed experimentally in the quasi-2D SrCr 9p Ga 12-9p O 19 (SCGO) (1-3) and in the 3D pyrochlore Y 2 Mo 2 O 7 (4). Immediately following, theoretical investigations (5-9) were performed to see if an intrinsic spin freezing transition is possible in a defect-free situation, aided by quantum fluctuations, as in the order-by-fluctuations phenomenon (10,11). Quantum fluctuations at T = 0 were shown to select a long-range ordered state in the 2D kagome isotropic antiferromagnet (AFM) (5, 6), later expanded to the isotropic pyroclore and SCGO (9). Anisotropic interactions were also considered as a possible origin of the glassy kagome AFM (7). For an XY pyrochlore AFM, thermal fluctuations were found to induce a conventional Neel order (8). Experimental works were also performed to investigate if the glassy states are extrinsic due to site defects or random couplings or intrinsic to the magnetic lattice (12, 13). The consensus is that the low-temperature spin freezing transitions in SCGO(p) near the clean limit (p ≈ 1) is not driven by site defects (13).The nature of the frozen state in SCGO has been investigated by numerous experimental techniques, including bulk susceptibility (1-3), specific heat (2, 14), muon spin relaxation (μSR) (15), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) (13, 16), and elastic and inelastic neutron scattering (17). Observed are spin glassy behaviors, such as field-cooled and zero-field-cooled (FC/ZFC) hysteresis in bulk susceptibility (3), as well as non-spin-glassy behav...

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