Control of effective free energy landscape in a frustrated magnet by a field pulse

Abstract

Thermal fluctuations can lift the degeneracy of a ground state manifold, producing a free energy landscape without accidentally degenerate minima. In a process known as order by disorder, a subset of states incorporating symmetry-breaking may be selected. Here, we show that such a free energy landscape can be controlled in a non-equilibrium setting as the slow motion within the ground state manifold is governed by the fast modes out of it. For the paradigmatic case of the classical pyrochlore XY antiferromagnet, we show that a uniform magnetic field pulse can excite these fast modes to generate a tunable effective free energy landscape with minima at thermodynamically unstable portions of the ground state manifold.

10 pages, 6 figures; minor revisions

References in corpus (2)

• Definitive Evidence for Order-by-Quantum-Disorder in Er2Ti2O7
• Quantum order by disorder and accidental soft mode Er2Ti2O7

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Non-reciprocal frustration: time crystalline order-by-disorder phenomenon and a spin-glass-like state
• Dynamical exciton condensates in biased electron-hole bilayers
• Prethermal time-crystalline spin ice and monopole confinement in a driven magnet
• Floquet engineering of many-body states by the ponderomotive potential
• Space-time symmetry breaking in nonequilibrium frustrated magnetism
• Nonequilibrium selection of magnetic order in driven triangular XY antiferromagnet
• Anticollinear order and degeneracy lifting in square lattice antiferromagnet LaSrCrO4
• Nonthermal order by disorder
• Fate of transient order parameter domain walls in ultrafast experiments
• Transient selection of competing order in frustrated spin Peierls systems after a quench