Quantum Coulomb Liquids of Different Rank in the Breathing Pyrochlore Antiferromagnet

2026/02/17 by Anonymous, Lasse Gresista, Daniel Lozano-Gómez +3
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Antiferromagnetism #Breathing #Coulomb #Multiferroics and related materials #Nuclear materials and radiation effects #Pyrochlore #Quantum #Rank (graph theory) #cond-mat.str-el

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/87fn-g2j3

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 066504 (2026). Editors' Suggestion · 9 pages, 6 figures and Supplemental Material

arxiv created 2026/02/17 · openalex publication_date 2026/06/11 · openalex created_date 2026/06/12 · arxiv updated 2026/08/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Emergent gauge fields and Coulomb liquids have long been central to the physics of frustrated pyrochlore magnets, yet their realization beyond conventional, i.e. rank-1 U(1), spin ice and into fully quantum higher-rank regimes has remained elusive. Here we provide a controlled demonstration of this physics in the spin-\tfrac12 quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the breathing pyrochlore lattice with symmetry-allowed Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya interactions, using the pseudofermion functional renormalization group. We show that tuning the breathing asymmetry stabilizes extended quantum analogues of both rank-1 and rank-2 U(1) Coulomb liquids within a single microscopic model, directly distinguished by their characteristic pinch-point morphologies in momentum space. This provides the first controlled quantum realization in three dimensions where gauge theories of different rank emerge within a single microscopic spin Hamiltonian. In addition, quantum fluctuations qualitatively reshape the classical nearest-neighbor atlas of phases, causing an incommensurate spiral instability and an extended quantum-disordered regime without dipolar order, both absent from the classical model. Our results establish the breathing pyrochlore as a timely and experimentally relevant platform where higher-rank gauge constraints, conventional magnetic order, and fluctuation-driven quantum phases compete on equal footing, opening a direct route to diagnosing emergent gauge structure in three-dimensional quantum magnets.

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