ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

Crystal field excitations of new low energy spin-1/2 triangular antiferromagnets

Abstract: Despite being frustrated, the triangular lattice antiferromagnet is expected to develop long-range magnetic order and spin-wave excitations at low temperatures. Theoretical studies suggest that the magnetic spectrum shows small deviations with respect to linear spin-wave theory with the band of excitations expected to be renormalized downward and broadened for the case of quantum spin-1/2. In contrast recent experiments on the spin-1/2 triangular antiferromagnet Ba3CoSb2O9 reveal major differences between the measured excitations and spin-wave theory, including 3 bands of excitations and a continuum that extends to much higher energies (6 times the exchange energy). Because of the unexpected nature of these results it is necessary to verify them in other materials, thus we plan to investigate the spectrum of the new effective spin-1/2 triangular lattice antiferromagnets Ba3CoNb2O9 and Ba3CoTa2O9. We also plan to investigate the crystal field levels of their magnetic Co2+ ions to determine their ground state wavefunction and identify the presence of any anisotropies.

Principal Investigator: Dr Alysia Lake
Local Contact: Dr Duc Le
Experimenter: Dr Nazmul Islam
Experimenter: Ms Fanjun Xu

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2310440

ISIS Experiment Number: RB2310440

Publisher: STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

Data format: RAW/Nexus
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Data Citation

The recommended format for citing this dataset in a research publication is as:
[author], [date], [title], [publisher], [doi]

For Example:
Dr Alysia Lake et al; (2024): Crystal field excitations of new low energy spin-1/2 triangular antiferromagnets, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2310440

Data is released under the CC-BY-4.0 license.