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Methods of Ex Situ and In Situ Investigations of Structural Transformations: The Case of Crystallization of Metallic Glasses
Published on: June 7, 2018
Magnon breakdown in a two dimensional triangular lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet of multiferroic LuMnO3
Joosung Oh1, Manh Duc Le1, Jaehong Jeong1
1Center for Correlated Electron Systems, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul 151-747, Korea and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-747, Korea.
Abstract:
The breakdown of magnons, the quasiparticles of magnetic systems, has rarely been seen. By using an inelastic neutron scattering technique, we report the observation of spontaneous magnon decay in multiferroic LuMnO3, a simple two dimensional Heisenberg triangular lattice antiferromagnet, with large spin S=2. The origin of this rare phenomenon lies in the nonvanishing cubic interaction between magnons in the spin Hamiltonian arising from the noncollinear 120° spin structure. We observed all three key features of the nonlinear effects as theoretically predicted: a rotonlike minimum, a flat mode, and a linewidth broadening, in our inelastic neutron scattering measurements of single crystal LuMnO3. Our results show that quasiparticles in a system hitherto thought of as "classical" can indeed break down.
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