Ground-state selection and spin-liquid behaviour in the classical Heisenberg model on the breathing pyrochlore lattice

Abstract

Magnetic pyrochlore oxides, including the spin ice materials, have proved to be a rich field for the study of geometrical frustration in 3 dimensions. Recently, a new family of magnetic oxides has been synthesised in which the half of the tetrahedra in the pyrochlore lattice are inflated relative to the other half, making an alternating array of small and large tetrahedra. These "breathing pyrochlore" materials such as LiGaCr4O8, LiInCr4O8 and Ba3Yb2Zn5O11 provide new opportunities in the study of frustrated magnetism. Here we provide an analytic theory for the ground state phase diagram and spin correlations for the minimal model of magnetism in breathing pyrochlores: a classical nearest neighbour Heisenberg model with different exchange coefficients for the two species of tetrahedra. We find that the phase diagram comprises a Coulombic spin liquid phase, a conventional ferromagnetic phase and an unusual antiferromagnetic phase with lines of soft modes in reciprocal space, stabilised by an order-by-disorder mechanism. We obtain a theory of the spin correlations in this model using the Self Consistent Gaussian Approximation (SCGA) which enables us to discuss the development of correlations in breathing pyrochlores as a function of temperature, and we quantitatively characterise the thermal crossover from the limit of isolated tetrahedra to the strongly correlated limit of the problem. We compare the results of our analysis with the results of recent neutron scattering experiments on LiInCr4O8.

12 pages, 10 figures

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