Spinon Phonon Interaction and Ultrasonic Attenuation in Quantum Spin Liquids

Abstract

Several experimental candidates for quantum spin liquids have been discovered in the past few years which appear to support gapless fermionic $S=\frac{1}{2}$ excitations called spinons. The spinons may form a Fermi sea coupled to a $U(1)$ gauge field, and may undergo a pairing instability. We show that despite being charge neutral, the spinons couple to phonons in exactly the same way that electrons do in the long wavelength limit. Therefore we can use sound attenuation to measure the spinon mass and lifetime. Furthermore, transverse ultrasonic attenuation is a direct probe of the onset of pairing because the Meissner effect of the gauge field causes a "rapid fall" of the attenuation at $T_c$ in addition to the reduction due to the opening of the energy gap. This phenomenon, well known in clean superconductors, may reveal the existence of the U(1) gauge field.

4+epsilon pages of main text + 12 pages of supplementary material

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Cited by in corpus (25)

• Quantum Spin Liquid States
• Pressure-Tuned Exchange Coupling of a Quantum Spin Liquid in the Molecular Triangular Lattice $\kappa$-(ET)${}_2$Ag${}_2$(CN)${}_3$
• Phonon dynamics in the Kitaev spin liquid
• Detecting spin fractionalization in a spinon Fermi surface spin liquid
• Method to characterize spinons as emergent elementary particles
• Confinement and Deconfinement of Spinons in Two Dimensions
• Detect Spinons via Spin Transport
• Quantum Monte Carlo studies of spinons in one-dimensional spin systems
• Elastic constants and ultrasonic attenuation in the cone state of the frustrated antiferromagnet Cs_2CuCl_4
• Temperature evolution of the phonon dynamics in the Kitaev spin liquid
• Spinon-Phonon Interaction in Algebraic Spin Liquids
• Spin Liquid States at the vicinity of metal-insulator transition
• Proposal to detect emergent gauge field and its Meissner effect in spin liquids using NV Centers
• Elastic constants and ultrasound attenuation in the spin-liquid phase of Cs${}_2$CuCl${}_4$
• Interplay of spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting in the absorption lineshape of 2D fermions
• Probing emergent QED in quantum spin ice via Raman scattering of phonons: shallow inelastic scattering and pair production
• Many-body theory of magneto-elasticity in one dimension
• Overscreened Kondo fixed point in S=1 spin liquid
• Spin-lattice Coupling in U(1) Quantum Spin Liquids
• Sound attenuation in the hyperhoneycomb Kitaev spin liquid
• Tuning magnetic interactions with nonequilibrium optical phonon populations: a theoretical study
• Can electronic quantum criticality drive phonon-induced linear-in-temperature resistivity?
• Phonon Induced Energy Relaxation in Quantum Critical Metals
• Collective effects in an incompressible electronic liquid
• Phonon anomalies and critical scaling in the spin-$1/2$ trimer chain Na${}_2$Cu${}_3$Ge${}_4$O${}_{12}$