Nematicity Liquid in a Trimerized-Kagome Antiferromagnet

TL;DR

This paper investigates the low-temperature behavior of a trimerized Kagome antiferromagnet with half-integer spins, revealing a nematicity liquid state with glassy dynamics and a defective network structure.

Contribution

It derives a low-energy effective model for half-integer spins on a trimerized Kagome lattice and characterizes the nematicity liquid state through classical simulations.

Findings

Nematicity dimers and trimers form a defective planar network.

Nematicities exhibit glassy slow dynamics at low temperatures.

Cluster spins fluctuate in a nonperiodically frozen nematic background.

Abstract

We theoretically study low-temperature properties of the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model with half-integer spin $S$ on the Kagome lattice with large trimerization. We have derived a low-energy effective model for general $S$ in terms of spin and nematicity operators in triangular units, and studied their low-temperature correlations for S=3/2 by classical Monte Carlo simulations. The previous study for the S=1/2 case [M. Ferrero et al., Phys. Rev. B 68, 214431 (2003)] reported a spin liquid state at low temperatures driven by a glassy behavior of isolated dimers and trimers of nematicities. The results for S=3/2 show that nematicity dimers and trimers are connected by weak links to form a defective planar network. At very low temperatures, nematicities show glassy slow dynamics, and cluster spins continue to fluctuate in a nonperiodically frozen background of nematicities. The characteristic time of glassy dynamics scales with temperature following a power law.