Vison crystal in quantum spin ice on the breathing pyrochlore lattice

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sanders, Alaric, Castelnovo, Claudio
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Sanders, Alaric
Castelnovo, Claudio
author_facet Sanders, Alaric
Castelnovo, Claudio
contents Recent excitement in the quantum spin ice community has come from the experimental discovery of pseudospin-$1/2$ breathing pyrochlores, including Ba$_3$Yb$_2$Zn$_5$O$_{11}$, in which inversion symmetry is broken by the `up' and `down' tetrahedra taking different physical sizes. We show here that the often-neglected $J_{z\pm}$ coupling between Kramers ions, in combination with the breathing nature of the lattice, can produce an imaginary ring flip term. This can lead to an unconventional '$U(1)_{π/2}$ phase', corresponding to a maximally dense packing of visons on the lattice. Coherent dynamics persists in all phases, together with its emergent QED description, in a manner reminiscent of fragmentation in spinon crystals. We characterize the enlarged QSI phase diagram and its excitations, showing that the imaginary ring flip acts both as a chemical potential for visons and as an effective three-photon vertex akin to strong light-matter coupling. The novel coupling causes a structured high-energy continuum to emerge above the photon dispersion, which is naturally interpreted as three photon up-conversion in a nonlinear optical crystal.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_17076
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vison crystal in quantum spin ice on the breathing pyrochlore lattice
Sanders, Alaric
Castelnovo, Claudio
Strongly Correlated Electrons
Statistical Mechanics
Recent excitement in the quantum spin ice community has come from the experimental discovery of pseudospin-$1/2$ breathing pyrochlores, including Ba$_3$Yb$_2$Zn$_5$O$_{11}$, in which inversion symmetry is broken by the `up' and `down' tetrahedra taking different physical sizes. We show here that the often-neglected $J_{z\pm}$ coupling between Kramers ions, in combination with the breathing nature of the lattice, can produce an imaginary ring flip term. This can lead to an unconventional '$U(1)_{π/2}$ phase', corresponding to a maximally dense packing of visons on the lattice. Coherent dynamics persists in all phases, together with its emergent QED description, in a manner reminiscent of fragmentation in spinon crystals. We characterize the enlarged QSI phase diagram and its excitations, showing that the imaginary ring flip acts both as a chemical potential for visons and as an effective three-photon vertex akin to strong light-matter coupling. The novel coupling causes a structured high-energy continuum to emerge above the photon dispersion, which is naturally interpreted as three photon up-conversion in a nonlinear optical crystal.
title Vison crystal in quantum spin ice on the breathing pyrochlore lattice
topic Strongly Correlated Electrons
Statistical Mechanics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17076