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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus
MA 11: FS: Topological Defects in Electronic Systems (with TT)
MA 11.3: Topical Talk
Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 10:30–11:00, H20
Manifestations of monopole physics in spin ice materials — •Claudio Castelnovo1, Roderich Moessner2, and Shivaji Sondhi3 — 1University of Oxford, Oxford, UK — 2MPI-PKS, Dresden, Germany — 3Princeton University, Princeton, USA
Spin ice materials such as Dy2Ti2O7 and Ho2Ti2O7 provide a rare instance of fractionalisation in three dimensions: their elementary excitations carry a fraction of the magnetic moment of the microscopic spin degrees of freedom, and they can be thought of as magnetic monopoles.
The peculiar nature of these excitations leads to unique signatures in the equilibrium and response properties. These include unusual neutron scattering structure factors, dynamical arrest and long lived non-equilibrium metastable states, as well as a response to external magnetic fields that promotes spin ice as a magnetic analogue of an electrolyte. In this talk, we review several of these striking phenomena.
The formulation of the low-temperature phase in terms of an emergent gauge field permits an unusual degree of analytical progress in the modelling of these materials.