The Ground State of Geometrically Frustrated Magnets

The ground state of real geometrically frustrated magnets is a long-standing puzzle. We recently showed that the spin glass state, ubiquitous in 3D Heisenberg systems, is due to defect-related quasispins and that defect-free systems develop a previously unrecognized energy scale, T*, significantly below the mean field energy. The entropy loss at T* is adiabatically connected to the zero point entropy of spin ice systems, thus unifying all frustrated systems across spin and space dimensions. These results pose a significant challenge for quantum spin liquid theories.

Speaker: Art Ramirez, UC Santa Cruz