Probing multi-spinon excitations outside of the two-spinon continuum in the antiferromagnetic spin chain cuprate Sr2CuO3

J. Schlappa, U. Kumar, K. J. Zhou, S. Singh, M. Mourigal, V. N. Strocov, A. Revcolevschi, L. Patthey, H. M. Rønnow, S. Johnston, T. Schmitt

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61 Scopus citations

Abstract

One-dimensional (1D) magnetic insulators have attracted significant interest as a platform for studying quasiparticle fractionalization, quantum criticality, and emergent phenomena. The spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with antiferromagnetic nearest neighbour interactions is an important reference system; its elementary magnetic excitations are spin-1/2 quasiparticles called spinons that are created in even numbers. However, while the excitation continuum associated with two-spinon states is routinely observed, the study of four-spinon and higher multi-spinon states is an open area of research. Here we show that four-spinon excitations can be accessed directly in Sr2CuO3 using resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) in a region of phase space clearly separated from the two-spinon continuum. Our finding is made possible by the fundamental differences in the correlation function probed by RIXS in comparison to other probes. This advance holds promise as a tool in the search for novel quantum states and quantum spin liquids.

Original languageEnglish
Article number5394
JournalNature Communications
Volume9
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2018

Funding

We thank C. Batista and K. Wohlfeld for useful discussions. The experiments were performed at the ADRESS BL of the Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institut. We acknowledge support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and its NCCR MaNEP. CPU time was provided in part by resources supported by the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (http://www.jics.utk.edu).

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