2015/07/28 by A. A. Aczel, Aczel, A. A., Ashley M. Cook +15
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1507.07920
openalex publication_date 2015/07/28 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We have performed inelastic neutron scattering experiments to investigate the magnetic excitations in the quasi-face-centered-cubic (fcc) iridate double perovskites La2ZnIrO6 and La2MgIrO6, which are characterized by A-type antiferromagnetic ground states. The neutron scattering data, which reveal gapped spin wave excitations with a very weak dispersion, are shown to be well-described by theoretical calculations on a model Hamiltonian with dominant Kitaev interactions. Our surprising finding shows that in contrast to honeycomb materials, where the Kitaev interaction manifests itself via complex magnetic order, even conventional magnetic orders in certain geometrically frustrated systems might owe their existence to unconventional Kitaev exchange.