Impurity effects in highly frustrated diamond-lattice antiferromagnets
Abstract
We consider the effects of local impurities in highly frustrated diamond-lattice antiferromagnets, which exhibit large but nonextensive ground-state degeneracies. Such models are appropriate to many A-site magnetic spinels. We argue very generally that sufficiently dilute impurities induce an ordered magnetic ground state and provide a mechanism of degeneracy breaking. The states that are selected can be determined by a "swiss cheese model" analysis, which we demonstrate numerically for a particular impurity model in this case. Moreover, we present criteria for estimating the stability of the resulting ordered phase to a competing frozen (spin glass) one. The results may explain the contrasting finding of frozen and ordered ground states in CoAl_2O_4 and MnSc_2S_4, respectively.
Additional Information
© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 25 March 2011; revised manuscript received 23 June 2011; published 29 August 2011. We thank Leo Radzihovsky for extensive discussions during the prehistory of this project. L.B. was supported by the Packard Foundation and National Science Foundation through Grants No. DMR-0804564 and No. PHY05-51164. J.A. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation through Grant No. DMR-1055522.Attached Files
Published - Savary2011p15699Phys_Rev_B.pdf
Submitted - 1103.4985v1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 25271
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110909-110431469
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- NSF
- DMR-0804564
- NSF
- PHY-0551164
- NSF
- DMR-1055522
- Created
-
2011-09-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter