Spin-orbital short-range order on a honeycomb-based lattice

Nakatsuji, Satoru*; Kuga, Kentaro*; Kimura, Kenta*; Satake, Ryuta*; Katayama, Naoyuki*; Nishibori, Eiji*; Sawa, Hiroshi*; Ishii, Rieko*; Hagiwara, Masayuki*; Bridges, F.*; et al.

Science, 336(6081), p.559 - 563, 2012/05

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1212154

Frustrated magnetic materials can remain disordered to the lowest temperatures. Such is the case for BaCuSbO, which is magnetically anisotropic at the atomic scale but curiously isotropic on mesoscopic length and time scales. We find that the frustration on the triangular lattice is imprinted in a nanostructured honeycomb lattice of Cu ions that resists a coherent static Jahn-Teller distortion. The resulting two-dimensional random-bond spin-1/2 system on the honeycomb lattice has a broad spectrum of spin-dimer like excitations and low-energy spin degrees of freedom that retain.