Strong coupling theory of spin and orbital excitations in Sr2IrO4

TL;DR

This paper develops a strong coupling theory for spin and orbital excitations in Sr2IrO4, revealing anisotropic exchange interactions and two distinct excitation modes due to spin-orbit coupling and Hund's coupling.

Contribution

It derives an effective spin Hamiltonian incorporating spin-orbit and Hund's coupling effects, and analyzes the resulting excitation spectrum with Green's functions.

Findings

Two excitation modes with different energies are identified.

A spin wave gap is explained by exchange anisotropy.

Distinct energies of modes at high-symmetry points are shown.

Abstract

We study the low-lying excitations in 5d transition-metal oxide Sr_2IrO_4 on the localized electron picture. We find that Hund's coupling together with the spin-orbit interaction leads to exchange anisotropy which causes the spin wave gap. Introducing the isospin operators acting on Kramers' doublet in Ir atoms, we derive the effective spin Hamiltonian from a multi-orbital Hubbard model with the t_{2g} orbitals in the square lattice. We introduce the Green's functions including the anomalous type for the boson operators by expanding the spin operators in terms of boson operators in the lowest order of 1/S, and solve the coupled equations of motion for those functions. Two modes are found to emerge with slightly different energies, in contrast to the spin waves in the isotropic Heisenberg model. At the $\Gamma$-point, one mode has the zero excitation energy while another has a finite energy. They have the same excitation energy at the M point, but still have different energies at the X point.