Anisotropic magnetic excitations of a frustrated bilinear-biquadratic spin model -- Implications for spin waves of detwinned iron pnictides

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spin excitations in a frustrated bilinear-biquadratic model relevant to iron pnictides, revealing how quadrupolar excitations influence anisotropic spin wave spectra, aligning with experimental observations.

Contribution

It introduces a flavor-wave theory approach to account for quadrupolar excitations in a frustrated spin model, providing new insights into spin dynamics in iron pnictides.

Findings

Quadrupolar excitations significantly affect spin wave anisotropy.

Theoretical results match neutron scattering measurements.

Electron correlations are crucial for understanding iron pnictides.

Abstract

Elucidating the nature of spin excitations is important to understanding the mechanism of superconductivity in the iron pnictides. Motivated by recent inelastic neutron scattering measurements in the nearly 100% detwinned BaFe$_{2}$As$_{2}$, we study the spin dynamics of an $S=1$ frustrated bilinear-biquadratic Heisenberg model in the antiferromagnetic phase with wavevector $(\pi,0)$. The biquadratic interactions are treated in a dynamical way using a flavor-wave theory in an $SU(3)$ representation. Besides the magnon (dipolar) excitations, the biquadratic interactions give rise to quadrupolar excitations at high energies. We find that the quadrupolar wave significantly influences, in an energy dependent way, the anisotropy between the spin excitation spectra along the $(\pi,0)$ and $(0,\pi)$ directions in the wave vector space. Our theoretical results capture the essential behavior of the spin dynamics measured in the antiferromagnetic phase of the detwinned BaFe$_2$As$_2$. More generally, our results underscore the importance of electron correlation effects for the microscopic physics of the iron pnictides.