A phason disordered two dimensional quantum antiferromagnet

TL;DR

This study investigates how a specific type of geometric disorder called phason flips affects the magnetic and quantum properties of a two-dimensional quantum antiferromagnet modeled on a Penrose tiling, revealing increased quantum fluctuations and altered magnon spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a model of a quantum antiferromagnet on a disordered quasiperiodic structure with no frustration and analyzes the effects of phason disorder using spin wave theory and Monte Carlo simulations.

Findings

Ground state energy decreases with disorder.

Magnon spectrum becomes smoother as disorder increases.

Effective spin wave velocity increases with disorder.

Abstract

We examine a novel type of disorder in quantum antiferromagnets. Our model consists of localized spins with antiferromagnetic exchanges on a bipartite quasiperiodic structure, which is geometrically disordered in such a way that no frustration is introduced. In the limit of zero disorder, the structure is the perfect Penrose rhombus tiling. This tiling is progressively disordered by augmenting the number of random "phason flips" or local tile-reshuffling operations. The ground state remains N\'eel ordered, and we have studied its properties as a function of increasing disorder using linear spin wave theory and quantum Monte Carlo. We find that the ground state energy decreases, indicating enhanced quantum fluctuations with increasing disorder. The magnon spectrum is progressively smoothed, and the effective spin wave velocity of low energy magnons increases with disorder. For large disorder, the ground state energy as well as the average staggered magnetization tend towards limiting values characteristic of this type of randomized tilings.