Field Induced Orbital Antiferromagnetism in Mott Insulators

Abstract

We report on a new electromagnetic phenomenon that emerges in Mott insulators, i.e., materials that do not conduct electricity because of strong electronic Coulomb repulsion. The phenomenon manifests as antiferromagnetic ordering due to orbital electric currents which are spontaneously generated from the coupling between spin currents and an external homogenous magnetic field. This novel spin-charge current effect provides the mechanism to detect the so far elusive spin currents by means of unpolarized neutron scattering, nuclear magnetic resonance or muon spectroscopy. We illustrate this mechanism by solving a half-filled Hubbard model on a frustrated ladder, a simple but nontrivial case of strongly interacting electrons.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• The ALPS project release 1.3: open source software for strongly correlated systems
• New Trends in Density Matrix Renormalization
• Electronic Orbital Currents and Polarization in Mott Insulators
• Vector chiral order in frustrated spin chains
• On calculation of vector spin chirality for zigzag spin chains

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Chiral Mott insulator with staggered loop currents in the fully frustrated Bose Hubbard model
• Vortices, skyrmions, and chirality waves in frustrated Mott insulators with a quenched periodic array of impurities
• Vestigial chiral and charge orders from bidirectional spin-density waves: Application to the iron-based superconductors
• Exact treatment of magnetism-driven ferroelectricity in the one-dimensional compass model
• Spin-current order in anisotropic triangular antiferromagnets
• Chiral phases of two-dimensional hard-core bosons with frustrated ring-exchange
• Spin-orbit coupling and electronic charge effects in Mott insulators
• Staircase of crystal phases of hard-core bosons on the Kagome lattice
• Effective Hamiltonian for transition-metal compounds. Application to Na_xCoO_2
• Semiclassical analysis of a magnetization plateau in a 2D frustrated ferrimagnet
• Resonant inelastic x-ray scattering study of vector chiral ordered kagome antiferromagnet
• High temperature non-collinear magnetism in a classical bilinear-biquadratic Heisenberg model
• Emergent magnetic order in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model with a [111] field
• Orbital Magnetism Induced by Heat Currents in Mott insulators
• Spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking without magnetism in a $S=1$ chain
• Insulating phases of electrons on a zigzag strip in the orbital magnetic field
• The large $|U|$ expansion for a half-filled asymmetric Hubbard model on a triangular ladder in the presence of spin-dependent magnetic flux