2014/03/31 by Heung-Sik Kim, Heung‐Sik Kim, Jino Im +2
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Condensed matter physics #Electron #Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides #Hamiltonian (control theory) #Physics #Quantum #Quantum entanglement #Quantum mechanics #Quantum spin liquid #Spin (aerodynamics) #Spin engineering #Spin polarization #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/ncomms4988
published as Nature Communications 5, 3988 (2014) · 17 pages and 4 figures, and with supplementary information (14 pages, 6 figures, and 5 tables). Details of the DFT+U results on the magnetism are included in the supplementary material
openalex publication_date 2014/06/03 · arxiv created 2014/06/07 · arxiv updated 2014/06/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The entanglement of the spin and orbital degrees of freedom through the spin-orbit coupling has been actively studied in condensed matter physics. In several iridium-oxide systems, the spin-orbital entangled state, identified by the effective angular momentum j\rm eff, can host novel quantum phases with the help of electron correlations. Here, we show that a series of lacunar spinel compounds, GaM4X8 (M = Nb, Mo, Ta, and W and X = S, Se, and Te), gives rise to a molecular j\rm eff state as a new spin-orbital composite on which the low energy effective Hamiltonian is based. A wide range of electron correlations is accessible by tuning the bandwidth under external and/or chemical pressure, enabling us to investigate the interesting cooperation between spin-orbit coupling and electron correlations. As illustrative examples, a two-dimensional topological insulating phase and an anisotropic spin Hamiltonian are investigated in the weak and strong coupling regimes, respectively. Our finding can provide an ideal platform for exploring j\rm eff physics and the resulting emergent phenomena.