Spinon Confinement and a Sharp Longitudinal Mode in YbPtPb in Magnetic Fields
arXiv:1907.01067 · doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08715-y
Abstract
The fundamental excitations in an antiferromagnetic chain of spins-1/2 are spinons, de-confined fractional quasiparticles that when combined in pairs, form a triplet excitation continuum. In an Ising-like spin chain the continuum is gapped and the ground state is N{é}el ordered. Here, we report high resolution neutron scattering experiments, which reveal how a magnetic field closes this gap and drives the spin chains in \YPP\ to a critical, disordered Luttinger-liquid state. In \YPP\ the effective spins-1/2 describe the dynamics of large, Ising-like Yb magnetic moments, ensuring that the measured excitations are exclusively longitudinal, which we find to be well described by time-dependent density matrix renormalization group calculations. The inter-chain coupling leads to the confinement of spinons, a condensed matter analog of quark confinement in quantum chromodynamics. Insensitive to transverse fluctuations, our measurements show how a gapless, dispersive longitudinal mode arises from confinement and evolves with magnetic order.
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