Spin dynamics of counterrotating Kitaev spirals via duality
Name
PhysRevB.94.201110.pdf
Size
1.45 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Kimchi, Itamar
Coldea, Radu
Date Issued
November 2016
Journal
Physical Review B
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Kimchi, Itamar, and Radu Coldea. “Spin Dynamics of Counterrotating Kitaev Spirals via Duality.” Physical Review B 94.20 (2016): n. pag. © 2016 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Incommensurate spiral order is a common occurrence in frustrated magnetic insulators. Typically, all magnetic moments rotate uniformly, through the same wavevector. However the honeycomb iridates family Li[subscript 2]IrO[subscript 3] shows an incommensurate order where spirals on neighboring sublattices are counterrotating, giving each moment a different local environment. Theoretically describing its spin dynamics has remained a challenge: The Kitaev interactions proposed to stabilize this state, which arise from strong spin-orbit effects, induce magnon umklapp scattering processes in spin-wave theory. Here we propose an approach via a (Klein) duality transformation into a conventional spiral of a frustrated Heisenberg model, allowing a direct derivation of the dynamical structure factor. We analyze both Kitaev and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya based models, both of which can stabilize counterrotating spirals, but with different spin dynamics, and we propose experimental tests to identify the origin of counterrotation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.201110
