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Phys. Rev. B 72, 184401 (2005) [6 pages]

Slow spin-glass and fast spin-liquid components in quasi-two-dimensional La2(Cu,Li)O4

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Y. Chen1,2,3, Wei Bao1,*, Y. Qiu2,3, J. E. Lorenzo4, J. L. Sarrao1, D. L. Ho2,3, and Min Y. Lin2,5
1Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA
2NIST Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA
3Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
4CNRS, Boîte Postale 166X, F-38043, Grenoble, France
5ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, Annandale, New Jersey 08801, USA

Received 7 March 2005; revised 20 September 2005; published 1 November 2005

In conventional spin glasses, magnetic interaction is not strongly anisotropic and the entire spin system is believed to be frozen below the spin-glass transition temperature. In La2Cu0.94Li0.06O4, for which the in-plane exchange interaction dominates the interplane one, only a fraction of spins with antiferromagnetic correlations extending to neighboring planes become spin glass. The remaining spins with only in-plane antiferromagnetic correlations remain spin liquid at low temperature. Such a partial spin freezing out of a two-dimensional spin liquid observed in this cold neutron scattering study is likely due to a delicate balance between disorder and quantum fluctuations in the quasi-two-dimensional S=1∕2 Heisenberg system.

© 2005 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.72.184401
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.72.184401
PACS:
75.10.Nr, 75.40.Gb, 78.70.Nx

*Electronic address: wbao@lanl.gov

 
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