Experimental study of spinon-phonon coupling in spin-chain cuprates

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the thermal transport properties of antiferromagnetic spin chains cuprates. The chain magnetic excitations, the spinons, partake in heat transport at low temperature, but spinon heat transport decays well below room temperature, possibly because of a coupling with phonons. By means of inelastic neutron scattering, we thoroughly study the lattice dynamics of spin chain compounds Sr2CuO3, Ca2CuO3, along with double spin-chain compounds SrCuO2. We come to the conclusion that there are no obvious anomalies in the phonon dispersions, which suggests a weak spinon-phonon coupling regime.