Multiferroicity in spin ice: towards a magnetic crystallography of Tb2Ti2O7 in a field

Abstract

We combine two aspects of magnetic frustration, multiferroicity and emergent quasi-particles in spin liquids, by studying magneto-electric monopoles. Spin ice offers to couple these emergent topological defects to external fields, and to each other, in unusual ways, making possible to lift the degeneracy underpinning the spin liquid and to potentially stabilize novel forms of charge crystals, opening the path to a "magnetic crystallography". In developing the general phase diagram including nearest-neighbour coupling, Zeeman energy, electric and magnetic dipolar interactions, we uncover the emergence of a bi-layered crystal of singly-charged monopoles, whose stability, remarkably, is strengthened by an external [110] magnetic field. Our theory is able to account for the ordering process of Tb2Ti2O7 in large field for reasonably small electric energy scales.

10 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Spin current and magneto-electric effect in non-collinear magnets
• Role of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in multiferroic perovskites
• Multiferroics: different ways to combine magnetism and ferroelectricity
• Hyper-honeycomb iridate $\beta$-Li2IrO3 as a platform for Kitaev magnetism
• Dynamically-Induced Frustration as a Route to a Quantum Spin Ice State in Tb2Ti2O7 via Virtual Crystal Field Excitations and Quantum Many-Body Effects
• Vesignieite BaCu3V2O8(OH)2 as a Candidate Spin-1/2 Kagome Antiferromagnet
• Why spin ice obeys the ice rules
• Lightly stuffed pyrochlore structure of single-crystalline Yb2Ti2O7 grown by the optical floating zone technique
• Structural distortion and the spin liquid state in Tb2Ti2O7
• A New Type of Quantum Criticality in the Pyrochlore Iridates
• Quantum spin configurations in Tb2Ti2O7
• Electronic transport in the Coulomb phase of the pyrochlore spin ice
• Crystal Field and Magnetoelastic Interactions in Tb2Ti2O7
• Field-Induced magnetic structures in Tb2Ti2O7 at low temperatures: From spin-ice to spin-flip structures

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Magnetic field effects in an octupolar quantum spin liquid candidate
• Experimental identification of electric dipoles induced by magnetic monopoles in Tb2Ti2O7
• The Classical Heisenberg Model on the Centred Pyrochlore Lattice
• Perfectly hidden order and Z2 confinement transition in a fully packed monopole liquid
• Exploring possible magnetic monopoles-induced magneto-electricity in spin ices