Fractons from frustration in hole-doped antiferromagnets

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that hole-doped antiferromagnets naturally exhibit fracton behavior, with immobile individual holes and mobile dipolar pairs, providing a realistic physical system for studying fractons.

Contribution

It shows how dipole conservation laws and fracton physics emerge in hole-doped antiferromagnets, connecting theoretical fracton models to experimental systems.

Findings

Fracton behavior exists in 2D Ising antiferromagnets under certain conditions.

Holes are immobile individually but form mobile dipolar pairs.

Experimental diagnostics support fracton phenomena in these systems.

Abstract

Recent theoretical research on tensor gauge theories led to the discovery of an exotic type of quasiparticles, dubbed fractons, that obey both charge and dipole conservation. Here we describe physical implementation of dipole conservation laws in realistic systems. We show that fractons find a natural realization in hole-doped antiferromagnets. There, individual holes are largely immobile, while dipolar hole pairs move with ease. First, we demonstrate a broad parametric regime of fracton behavior in hole-doped two-dimensional Ising antiferromagnets viable through five orders in perturbation theory. We then specialize to the case of holes confined to one dimension in an otherwise two-dimensional antiferromagnetic background, which can be realized via the application of external fields in experiments, and prove ideal fracton behavior. We explicitly map the model onto a fracton Hamiltonian featuring conservation of dipole moment. Manifestations of fractonicity in these systems include gravitational clustering of holes. We also discuss diagnostics of fracton behavior, which we argue is borne out in existing experimental results.