Certain classical statistical systems with strong local constraints are known to exhibit Coulomb phases, where long-range correlation functions have power-law forms. Continuous transitions from these into ordered phases cannot be described by a naive application of the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson theory, since neither phase is thermally disordered. We present an alternative approach to a critical theory for such systems, based on a mapping to a quantum problem in one fewer spatial dimensions. We apply this method to spin ice, a magnetic material with geometrical frustration, which exhibits a Coulomb phase and a continuous transition to an ordered state in the presence of a magnetic field applied in the [100] direction.
Dy2Ti2O7 is a geometrically frustrated magnetic material with a strongly correlated spin ice regime that extends from 1 K down to as low as 60 mK. The diffuse elastic neutron scattering intensities in the spin ice regime can be remarkably well described by a phenomenological model of weakly interacting hexagonal spin clusters, as invoked in other geometrically frustrated magnets. We present a highly refined microscopic theory of Dy2Ti2O7 that includes long-range dipolar and exchange interactions to third nearest neighbors and which demonstrates that the clusters are purely fictitious in this m…
Ground-state phase diagram of the mixed spin-1/2 and spin-1 Ising-Heisenberg model on doubly decorated planar lattices is examined using the generalized decoration-iteration transformation. The main attention is devoted to the comparison of the ground-state properties of the quantum Ising-Heisenberg model and its semi-classical Ising analogue.
Field-driven phase transitions generally arise from competition between Zeeman energy and exchange or crystal-field anisotropy. Here we present the phase diagram of a frustrated pyrochlore magnet Gd2Ti2O7, where crystal field splitting is small compared to the dipolar energy. We find good agreement between zero-temperature critical fields and those obtained from a mean-field model. Here, dipolar interactions couple real-space and spin-space, so the transitions in Gd2Ti2O7 arise from field-induced "cooperative anisotropy" reflecting the broken spatial symmetries of the pyrochlore lattice.
These lecture notes are intended to provide a simple overview of the physics of geometrically frustrated magnets. The emphasis is on classical and semiclassical treatments of the statistical mechanics and dynamics of frustrated Heisenberg models, and on the ways in which the results provide an understanding of some of the main observed properties of these systems.
Starting from the archetypical geometrically frustrated magnetic objects -- equilateral triangle and tetrahedron -- we consider an imaginary object: a multidimensional tetrahedron with spins $1/2$ in the each vertex and equal Heisenberg magnetic exchange along each edge. Many-particle case is obtained by setting dimensionality $d$ to high numbers, hence providing likely the most geometrically frustrated magnetic system ever possible. This problem has an exact solution for each $d$, obtained by simple student-level approach. As a result, this imaginary object clearly demonstrates at $d\to{}\inf…
We investigate the consequences for geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets of weak disorder in the strength of exchange interactions. Taking as a model the classical Heisenberg antiferromagnet with nearest neighbour exchange on the pyrochlore lattice, we examine low-temperature behaviour. We show that random exchange generates long-range effective interactions within the extensively degenerate ground states of the clean system. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we find a spin glass transition at a temperature set by the disorder strength. Disorder of this type, which is generated by random str…
Thermodynamic and magnetocaloric properties of geometrically frustrated Ising spin clusters of selected shapes and sizes are studied by exact enumeration. In the ground state the magnetization and the entropy show step-wise variations with an applied magnetic field. The number of steps, their widths and heights depend on the cluster shape and size. While the character of the magnetization plateau heights is always increasing, the entropy is not necessarily decreasing function of the field, as one would expect. For selected clusters showing some interesting ground-state properties, the calculat…
Magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of geometrically frustrated antiferromagnetic Ising (IA) and ferromagnetic spin ice (SI) models on a nanocluster with a `Star of David' topology, including next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interactions, are studied by an exact enumeration. In an external field applied in characteristic directions of the respective models, depending on the NNN interaction sign and magnitude, the ground state magnetization of the IA model is found to display up to three intermediate plateaus at fractional values of the saturation magnetization, while the SI model shows only one …
The technique of damage spreading is used to study the phase diagram of the easy axis anisotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnet on two geometrically frustrated lattices. The triangular and kagome systems are built up from triangular units that either share edges or corners respectively. The triangular lattice undergoes two sequential Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions while the kagome lattice undergoes a glassy transition. In both cases, the phase boundaries obtained using damage spreading are in good agreement with those obtained from equilibrium Monte Carlo simulations.
Phase transitions of the mixed spin-1/2 and spin-1 Ising-Heisenberg model on several decorated planar lattices consisting of interconnected diamonds are investigated within the framework of the generalized decoration-iteration transformation. The main attention is paid to the systematic study of the finite-temperature phase diagrams in dependence on the lattice topology. The critical behaviour of the hybrid quantum-classical Ising-Heisenberg model is compared with the relevant behaviour of its semi-classical Ising analogue. It is shown that both models on diamond-like decorated planar lattices…
Critical properties of a geometrically frustrated generalized $XY$ model with antiferromagnetic (AFM) and third-order antinematic (AN3) couplings on a triangular lattice are studied by Monte Carlo simulation. It is found that such a generalization leads to a phase diagram consisting of three different quasi-long-range ordered (QLRO) phases. Compared to the model with the second-order antinematic (AN2) coupling, besides the AFM and AN3 phases which appear in the limits of relatively strong AFM and AN3 interactions, respectively, it includes an additional complex canted antiferromagnetic (CAFM) …
Thermal entanglement of a geometrically frustrated spin-1 Heisenberg diamond cluster is examined within the framework of the exact diagonalization method by computing the measure of entanglement negativity. The calculated exact analytical results are applied in order to obtain theoretical prediction of the robustness of bipartite thermal entanglement of the tetranuclear nickel complex [Ni4(CO3)2(aetpy)8](ClO4)4 (aetpy = 2-aminoethyl-pyridine) against rising temperature and magnetic field.
Here we consider the Ising-Heisenberg model in the expanded Kagomé lattice, also known as triangle-dodecagon (3-12) or star lattice. This model can still be understood as a decorated honeycomb lattice. Assuming that the Heisenberg spins are at the vertices of the triangle while other spins are of the Ising type. Thus, this model is equivalent to an effective Kagomé Ising lattice, through the decoration transformation technique. Thus this means that the model is exactly solvable so we can study the most relevant properties of this model. Like the phase diagram at zero temperature, exhibiting a …
The study of frustrated spin systems often requires time-consuming numerical simulations. As the simplest approach, the classical Ising model is often used to investigate the thermodynamic behavior of such systems. Exploiting the small correlation lengths in frustrated Ising systems, we develop a method for obtaining a first approximation to the energetic properties of frustrated two-dimensional Ising systems using small networks of less than 30 spins. These small networks allow much faster numerical simulations, and more importantly, analytical calculation of the properties from the partition…
The recent identification of the dysprosium titanate compound $Dy_2 Ti_2 O_7$ as a ``Spin-Ice'', i.e. the spin analog of regular entropic ice of Pauling, has created considerable excitement. The ability to manipulate spins using magnetic fields gives a unique advantage over regular ice in these systems, and has been used to study the recovery of entropy. Predicted magnetization plateaus have been observed, testing the underlying model consisting of a competition between short ranged super exchange, and long ranged dipolar interactions between spins. I discuss other compounds that are possibly …
Spin crossover materials contain metal ions that can access two spin-states: one low-spin (LS), the other high-spin (HS). We propose that frustrated elastic interactions can give rise to spin-state ices -- phases of matter without long-range order, characterized by a local constraint or `ice rule'. The low-energy physics of spin-state ices is described by an emergent divergence-less gauge field with a gap to topological excitations that are deconfined quasi-particles with spin fractionalized midway between the spins of the LS and HS states.
We study the transport properties for a family of geometrically frustrated models on the triangular lattice with an interaction scale far exceeding the single-particle bandwidth. Starting from the interaction-only limit, which can be solved exactly, we analyze the transport and thermodynamic behavior as a function of filling and temperature at the leading non-trivial order in the single-particle hopping. Over a broad range of intermediate temperatures, we find evidence of a dc resistivity scaling linearly with temperature and with typical values far exceeding the quantum of resistance, $h/e^2$…
We show the existence of invariant energy levels in a Kondo lattice model on an isolated complete graph, such as a triangle and a tetrahedron. These energy levels always have fixed eigenenergies $t \pm J/2$, irrespective of the configuration of localized moments ($t$ is the transfer integral of conduction electrons and $J$ is the spin-charge coupling constant). We also extend the analysis to geometrically frustrated lattices by using the complete graphs as basic building blocks. We show that the construction rule for the invariant energy levels leads to the existence condition of localized sta…
We study geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets with magnetoelastic coupling. Frustration in these systems may be relieved by a structural transition to a low temperature phase with reduced lattice symmetry. We examine the statistical mechanics of this transition and the effects on it of quenched disorder, using Monte Carlo simulations of the classical Heisenberg model on the pyrochlore lattice with coupling to uniform lattice distortions. The model has a transition between a cubic, paramagnetic high-temperature phase and a tetragonal, Neel ordered low-temperature phase. It does not support…
The geometrically-frustrated spin glass Y2Mo2O7 has been considered widely to be crystallographically ordered with a unique nearest neighbor magnetic exchange interaction, J. To test this assertion, we present x-ray-absorption fine-structure results for the Mo and Y K edges as a function of temperature and compare them to results from a well-ordered pyrochlore, Tl2Mn2O7. We find that the Mo-Mo pair distances are significantly disordered at approximately right angles to the Y-Mo pairs. These results strongly suggest that lattice disorder nucleates the spin-glass phase in this material.
Histogram Monte Carlo simulation is used to investigate effects of biquadratic exchange $J_{2}$ on phase transitions of a 3D classical XY antiferromagnet with frustration induced by the antiferromagnetic exchange $J_{1}$ and the stacked triangular lattice geometry. The biquadratic exchange is considered negative (antiferroquadrupolar) within the triangular planes and positive (ferroquadrupolar) between the planes. The phase diagram obtained features a variety of interesting phenomena arising from the presence of both the biquadratic exchange and frustration. In a strong biquadratic exchange li…
We study the effect in geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets of weak, random variations in the strength of exchange interactions. Without disorder the simplest classical models for these systems have macroscopically degenerate ground states, and this degeneracy may prevent ordering at any temperature. Weak exchange randomness favours a small subset of these ground states and induces a spin-glass transition at an ordering temperature determined by the amplitude of modulations in interaction strength. We use the replica approach to formulate a theory for this transition, showing that it fall…
Above the saturation field, geometrically frustrated quantum antiferromagnets have dispersionless low-energy branches of excitations corresponding to localized spin-flip modes. Transition into a partially magnetized state occurs via condensation of an infinite number of degrees of freedom. The ground state below the phase transition is a magnon crystal, which breaks only translational symmetry and preserves spin-rotations about the field direction. We give a detailed review of recent works on physics of such phase transitions and present further theoretical developments. Specifically, the low-…
We study the ground-state and low-energy properties of classical vector spin models with nearest-neighbour antiferromagnetic interactions on a class of geometrically frustrated lattices which includes the kagome and pyrochlore lattices. We explore the behaviour of these magnets that results from their large ground-state degeneracies, emphasising universal features and systematic differences between individual models. We investigate the circumstances under which thermal fluctuations select a particular subset of the ground states, and find that this happens only for the models with the smallest…
A model for a Heisenberg antiferromagnet on a pyrochlore lattice with exchange and dipole-dipole interactions is studied via mean-field theory. In treating the dipoles by use of the Ewald method, a soft (critical) mode with a unique ordering wave vector is selected for all strengths of the dipole-dipole coupling. For weak dipoles a partially ordered, three sublattice spin structure (P state), with q_{ord}= (1/2 1/2 1/2), is selected. A fully ordered, four sublattice spin structure (F state), with q = (000), competes with the P state and becomes the stable structure as the temperature is reduce…
This perspective will overview an emerging paradigm for self-organized soft materials, {\it geometrically-frustrated assemblies}, where interactions between self-assembling elements (e.g. particles, macromolecules, proteins) favor local packing motifs that are incompatible with uniform global order in the assembly. This classification applies to a broad range of material assemblies including self-twisting protein filament bundles, amyloid fibers, chiral smectics and membranes, particle-coated droplets, curved protein shells and phase-separated lipid vesicles. In assemblies, geometric frustrati…
From a microscopic model for the pyrochlore antiferromagnet Tb2Sn2O7, including the crystal field Hamiltonian and interactions between the angular momenta, we compute an effective pseudospin-1/2 Hamiltonian Heff$ that incorporates perturbatively in the effective interactions the effect of excited crystal field levels. We obtain the semiclassical ground states of Heff and find a region of parameter space with a two-in/two-out spin ice configuration on each tetrahedron with ordering wavevector q=0 and with spins canted away from the local Ising axes as found in Tb2Sn2O7. This ground state can al…
We investigate a detail of a dodecamer cluster ordering in a double-exchange spin ice model on a kagomé lattice. In frustrated systems, ordinary spin orderings are suppressed and macroscopic degeneracy remains down to low temperatures. In some frustrated systems, the degeneracy is lifted due to residual interactions and cluster orderings are stabilized. In the present model, the spin ice state is first formed at intermediate temperatures, and further entropies are released at lower temperatures as the dodecamer phase emerges. Since the spin symmetry is not broken in the dodecamer phase, there …
Quenched disorder may prevent the formation of the widely sought quantum-spin-liquid states (QSLs) or mask their signatures by inducing a spin-glass state, which is why considerable experimental efforts are directed at purifying materials that may host QSLs. However, in geometrically frustrated (GF) magnets, the largest class of materials in which QSLs are sought, the glass-transition temperature $T_g$ grows with decreasing the density of vacancy defects, accompanied by a simultaneous growth of the magnetic susceptibility. In this paper, we develop a phenomenological theory of glass transition…
A systematic study of both classical and quantum geometric frustrated Ising models with a competing ordering mechanism is reported in this paper. The ordering comes in the classical case from a coupling of 2D layers and in the quantum model from the quantum dynamics induced by a transverse field. By mapping the Ising models on a triangular lattice to elastic lattices of non-crossing strings, we derive an exact relation between the spin variables and the displacement field of the strings. Using this map both for the classical (2+1)D stacked model and the quantum frustrated 2D system, we obtain …
The geometric frustration of the spin-1/2 Ising-Heisenberg model on the triangulated Kagome (triangles-in-triangles) lattice is investigated within the framework of an exact analytical method based on the generalized star-triangle mapping transformation. Ground-state and finite-temperature phase diagrams are obtained along with other exact results for the partition function, Helmholtz free energy, internal energy, entropy, and specific heat, by establishing a precise mapping relationship to the corresponding spin-1/2 Ising model on the Kagome lattice. It is shown that the residual entropy of t…
Although initially introduced to mimic the spin-ice pyrochlores, no artificial spin ice has yet exhibited the expected degenerate ice-phase with critical correlations similar to the celebrated Coulomb phase in the pyrochlore lattice. Here we study a novel artificial spin ice based on a vertex-frustrated rather than pairwise frustrated geometry and show that it exhibits a quasicritical ice phase of extensive residual entropy and, significantly, algebraic correlations. Interesting in its own regard as a novel realization of frustration in a vertex system, our lattice opens new pathways to study …
We propose an intuitively appealing formulation of the zero-temperature triangular lattice Ising antiferromagnet (TIAFM) on a cylinder as a model of noninteracting fermions hopping on a ring and evolving in imaginary time with pair annihilation events. Among the features of the model which can then be related to local semi-conservation of particle number are: infinite-range influence of boundary conditions, multiple "zero temperature pure phases" in the infinite-length limit differing in entropy density, sensitivity of the asymptotic rate of decay (with respect to length) of mutual information…
Ice states, in which frustrated interactions lead to a macroscopic ground-state degeneracy, occur in water ice, in problems of frustrated charge order on the pyrochlore lattice, and in the family of rare-earth magnets collectively known as spin ice. Of particular interest at the moment are "quantum spin ice" materials, where large quantum fluctuations may permit tunnelling between a macroscopic number of different classical ground states. Here we use zero-temperature quantum Monte Carlo simulations to show how such tunnelling can lift the degeneracy of a spin or charge ice, stabilising a uniqu…
The promise of quantum computing lies in harnessing programmable quantum devices for practical applications such as efficient simulation of quantum materials and condensed matter systems. One important task is the simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets in which topological phenomena can emerge from competition between quantum and thermal fluctuations. Here we report on experimental observations of relaxation in such simulations, measured on up to 1440 qubits with microsecond resolution. By initializing the system in a state with topological obstruction, we observe quantum annealing (QA…
