Macroscopic signature of protected spins in a dense frustrated magnet

Abstract

The inability of systems of interacting objects to satisfy all constraints simultaneously leads to frustration. A particularly important consequence of frustration is the ability to access certain protected parts of a system without disturbing the others. For magnets such "protectorates" have been inferred from theory and from neutron scattering, but their practical consequences have been unclear. We show that a magnetic analogue of optical hole-burning can address these protected spin clusters in a well-known, geometrically frustrated Heisenberg system, gadolinium gallium garnet. Our measurements additionally provide a resolution of a famous discrepancy between the bulk magnetometry and neutron diffraction results for this magnetic compound.

References in corpus (3)

• Direct measurement of antiferromagnetic domain fluctuations
• Exact low-temperature behavior of kagome antiferromagnet at high fields
• Exact eigenstates and macroscopic magnetization jumps in strongly frustrated spin lattices

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Dynamics in many-body localized quantum systems without disorder
• Semi-classical spin dynamics of the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the kagome lattice
• Dispersionless spin waves in Gadolinium Gallium Garnet
• Updating the phase diagram of the archetypal frustrated magnet Gd3Ga5O12
• Anisotropic phase diagram and spin fluctuations of the hyperkagome magnet Gd3Ga5O12 as revealed by sound velocity measurements
• Antiferromagnetism and Ising Ground States in the Rare-earth Garnet Nd${}_3$Ga${}_5$O${}_{12}$
• Model of the low temperature magnetic phases of gadolinium gallium garnet
• Spin dynamics of the director state in frustrated hyperkagome systems