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Published August 29, 2011 | Version Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Impurity effects in highly frustrated diamond-lattice antiferromagnets

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
  • 2. ROR icon Columbia University
  • 3. ROR icon University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 4. ROR icon University of California, Irvine
  • 5. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

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

Files

1103.4985v1.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
25271
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20110909-110431469

Related works

Describes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4985 (URL)

Funding

David and Lucile Packard Foundation
NSF
DMR-0804564
NSF
PHY-0551164
NSF
DMR-1055522

Dates

Created
2011-09-09
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-09
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

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Caltech groups
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter , Physics Department