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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 87: Frustrated Magnets: Spin Liquids
TT 87.10: Talk
Friday, March 22, 2024, 12:00–12:15, H 3010
Signatures of fractionalization in phonon spectral functions — •Josef Willsher1,2, Urban F. P. Seifert3, and Johannes Knolle1,2,4 — 1TU Munich, Germany — 2MCQST, Germany — 3Kavili Institute, Santa Barbara, USA — 4Imperial College London, UK
A complicating factor in the realization and observation of gapless quantum spin liquids in materials is the ubiquitous presence of other degrees of freedom which may relieve geometric frustration, in particular phonons. We study the U(1) Dirac spin liquid and investigate how the coupling between spin-singlet monopoles and phonons manifests in the spectral properties of the phonons. We find that the critical gauge fluctuations of the algebraic spin liquid lead to a continuum of excitations in the phonon spectrum. A finite-temperature scaling Ansatz predicts a T-dependent Kohn-like anomaly of the phonon dispersion which could provide a universal signature of the Dirac spin liquid. This framework is able to recover the phenomenology of the recently described spin-Peierls instability of this system. We discuss the extension of these results to ultrasound attenuation experiments, as well as their applicability to other gapless spin liquids.
Keywords: Dirac spin liquid; spin-phonon coupling; fractionalization