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R. G. Herb Condensed Matter Seminar
Fermionic spinons in two and three dimensions
Date: Thursday, May 14th
Time: 10:00 am
Place: 5310 Chamberlin
Speaker: Zhihao Hao, Johns Hopkins University
Abstract: The low energy elementary excitations of the Heisenberg model are magnons, bosons with integer spin if the system is bipartite and has long range order in the ground state. It has been long conjectured that spinons, fermions with spin one half, are the effective degrees of freedom for spin 1/2 frustrated antiferromagnets. While existence of spinons is well established in one dimension, they remain elusive in higher dimensional systems. In this talk we are going to demonstrate there are fermionic spinons in kagome lattice and hyper-kagome lattice. The spinons are topological excitations and couples strongly to a compact U(1) gauge field. They can also be electrically charged through either magnetostriction or higher order perturbation effects. The spinons interact with each other through an exchange mediated attraction and form tightly bound bosonic pairs. The lowest energy triplet excitation of the ground state breaks one such pair into two free spinons at the energy cost of 0.06J, which is the mechanism responsible for the spin gap of the kagome and hyperkagome lattice.
Host: Natalia Perkins
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