2025/05/01 by A. Brassington, Brassington, A., Qianli Ma +31
Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced NMR Techniques and Applications #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #FOS: Physical sciences #Magneto-Optical Properties and Applications #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.00766
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The quantum dimer magnet, with antiferromagnetic intradimer and interdimer Heisenberg exchange between spin-1/2 moments, is known to host an up/down - down/up singlet ground state when the intradimer exchange is dominant. Rare-earth-based quantum dimer systems with strong spin-orbit coupling offer the opportunity for tuning their magnetic properties by using magnetic anisotropy as a control knob. Here, we present bulk characterization and neutron scattering measurements of the quantum dimer magnet Yb2Be2SiO7. We find that the Yb3+ ions can be described by an effective spin-1/2 model at low temperatures and the system does not show signs of magnetic order down to 50 mK. The magnetization, heat capacity, and neutron spectroscopy data can be well-described by an isolated dimer model with highly anisotropic exchange that stabilizes a singlet ground state with a wavefunction up/up - down/down or up/up + down/down. Our results show that strong spin-orbit coupling can induce novel entangled states of matter in quantum dimer magnets.