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Phys. Rev. B 68, 020401(R) (2003) [4 pages]

Er2Ti2O7: Evidence of quantum order by disorder in a frustrated antiferromagnet

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J. D. M. Champion1,2,3, M. J. Harris2, P. C. W. Holdsworth3, A. S. Wills4, G. Balakrishnan5, S. T. Bramwell1,*, E. Čižmár6, T. Fennell7, J. S. Gardner8,9, J. Lago1, D. F. McMorrow10, M. Orendáč6, A. Orendáčová6, D. McK. Paul5, R. I. Smith2, M. T. F. Telling2, and A. Wildes4
1University College London, Department of Chemistry, 20 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AJ, United Kingdom
2ISIS Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, OX11 0QX, United Kingdom
3Laboratoire de Physique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 46 Allée d’Italie, F-69364 Lyon, France
4Institut Laue-Langevin, 6 rue Jules Horowitz, BP 156 - 38042 Grenoble Cedex 9, France
5Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom
6Department of Physics, P. J. Šafárik University, 041 54 Košice, Slovakia
7The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1X 4BS, United Kingdom
8Department of Physics, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973-5000, USA
9NIST Center for Neutron Research, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899-8562, USA
10Risø National Laboratory, P.O. 49, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark

Received 18 April 2003; published 16 July 2003

Er2Ti2O7 has been suggested to be a realization of the frustrated 〈111〉XY pyrochlore lattice antiferromagnet, for which theory predicts fluctuation-induced symmetry breaking in a highly degenerate ground state manifold. We present a theoretical analysis of the classical model compared to neutron scattering experiments on the real material, both below and above TN=1.173(2)K. The model correctly predicts the ordered magnetic structure, suggesting that the real system has order stabilized by zero-point quantum fluctuations that can be modeled by classical spin wave theory. However, the model fails to describe the excitations of the system, which show unusual features.

© 2003 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.68.020401
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.68.020401
PACS:
75.10.-b, 28.20.Cz, 75.25.+z

*Author for correspondence: s.t.bramwell@ucl.ac.uk

 
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