Fluctuating pseudospin dimers in cluster Mott insulator

ORAL

Abstract

The Lacunar spinel, GaTa4Se8, is a unique Mott insulator that hosts molecular spin-orbit Jeff-3/2 states as correlation units. The material undergoes a concurrent magnetic and structural transition at 50 K and forms a singlet ground state below the transition temperature. The magnetic ground states are entangled to the lattice distortion, and a preceding phonon mode was observed by neutron scattering measurements. However, there are no signs of the transition in the local distortion from x-ray and neutron pair distribution function measurements indicating the fluctuating dimer phase in GaTa4Se8. In this talk, I will discuss a series of x-ray and neutron pair distribution function measurements combining the phonon analysis to uncover the fluctuating pseudospin dimer phase in this representative cluster Mott insulator.

*This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Award Number DE-SC0021223.

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Presenters

  • Tsung-Han Yang

    • Brown University

Authors

  • Tsung-Han Yang

    • Brown University

  • Tomoya Higo

    • The Institute for Solid State physics, The Univerisity of Tokyo

  • Kawamoto Shinya

    • The Institute for Solid State physics, The Univerisity of Tokyo

  • Satoru Nakatsuji

    • Univ of Tokyo-Kashiwanoha
    • Department of Physics, University of Tokyo
    • The University of Tokyo
    • University of Tokyo, Japan
    • Univ of Tokyo
    • Dept. of Phys. Univ. of Tokyo

  • Kemp Plumb

    • Brown University