Antiferromagnetism in two-dimensional quasicrystals

TL;DR

This paper investigates antiferromagnetic properties and excitations in two-dimensional quasicrystals, revealing inhomogeneous Neel order and unique magnon modes in non-periodic structures.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of magnetic ground states and magnon excitations in bipartite quasicrystalline tilings like octagonal and Penrose, highlighting inhomogeneous order.

Findings

Inhomogeneous Neel order in quasicrystals

Distinct magnon excitation spectra

Insights into spin correlations in aperiodic systems

Abstract

Quasiperiodic structures possess long range positional order, but are freed of constraints imposed by translational invariance. For spins interacting via Heisenberg couplings, one may expect therefore to find novel magnetic configurations in such structures. We have studied magnetic properties for simple two dimensional models, as a first step towards understanding experimentally studied magnetic quasicrystals such as the Zn-Mg-R(rare earth) compounds. We analyse properties of the antiferromagnetic ground state and magnon excitation modes for bipartite tilings such as the octagonal and Penrose tilings. In the absence of frustration, one has an inhomogeneous Neel-ordered ground state, with local quantum fluctuations of the local staggered magnetic order parameter. We study the spin wave spectrum and wavefunctions of such antiferromagnets within the linear spin wave approximation. Some results for spin-spin correlations in these systems are discussed.