Pulling Order Back from the Brink of Disorder: Observation of a Nodal-Line Spin Liquid and Fluctuation Stabilized Order in <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msub> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">K</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:msub> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>IrCl</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>6</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:mrow> </mml:math>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Competing interactions in frustrated magnets can give rise to highly degenerate ground states from which correlated liquidlike states of matter often emerge. The scaling of this degeneracy influences the ultimate ground state, with extensive degeneracies potentially yielding quantum spin liquids, while subextensive or smaller degeneracies yield static orders. A long-standing problem is to understand how ordered states precipitate from this degenerate manifold and what echoes of the degeneracy survive ordering. Here, we use neutron scattering to experimentally demonstrate a new “nodal-line” spin liquid, where spins collectively fluctuate within a subextensive manifold spanning one-dimensional lines in reciprocal space. Realized in the spin-orbit-coupled, face-centered-cubic iridate <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <a:msub> <a:mi mathvariant="normal">K</a:mi> <a:mn>2</a:mn> </a:msub> <a:msub> <a:mi>IrCl</a:mi> <a:mn>6</a:mn> </a:msub> </a:math> , we show that the subextensive degeneracy is robust, but remains susceptible to fluctuations or longer-range interactions which cooperate to select a magnetic order at low temperatures. Proximity to the nodal-line spin liquid influences the ordered state, enhancing the effects of quantum fluctuations that in turn act to stabilize the sublattice magnetization through the self-consistent opening of a large spin-wave gap. Our results demonstrate how quantum fluctuations can act counterintuitively in frustrated materials: Even in a case where fluctuations are ineffective at selecting an ordered state from a degenerate manifold, at the brink of the nodal spin liquid, they can act to protect the ordered state and dictate its low-energy physics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.753 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".