Magneto-optical Faraday effect in spin-liquid candidates
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PhysRevB.90.121105.pdf
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133.22 KB
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Author(s)
Drew, H. Dennis
Lee, Patrick A.
Colbert, Jacob Reid
Date Issued
September 2014
Journal
Physical Review B
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Colbert, Jacob R., H. Dennis Drew, and Patrick A. Lee. “Magneto-Optical Faraday Effect in Spin-Liquid Candidates.” Phys. Rev. B 90, no. 12 (September 2014). © 2014 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We propose an experiment to use the magneto-optical Faraday effect to probe the dynamic Hall conductivity of spin-liquid candidates. Theory predicts that an external magnetic field will generate an internal gauge field. If the source of conductivity is in spinons with a Fermi surface, a finite Faraday rotation angle is expected. We predict the angle to scale as the square of the frequency rather than display the standard cyclotron resonance pattern. Furthermore, the Faraday effect should be able to distinguish the ground state of the spin liquid, as we predict no rotation for massless Dirac spinons. We give a semiquantitative estimate for the magnitude of the effect and find that it should be experimentally feasible to detect in both κ-(ET)[subscript 2] Cu[subscript 2] (CN)[subscript 3] and, if the spinons form a Fermi surface, herbertsmithite. We also comment on the magneto-optical Kerr effect and show that the imaginary part of the Kerr angle (circular dichroism) may be measurable.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.90.121105
