Strain tuning of highly frustrated magnets: Order and disorder in the distorted kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet

TL;DR

This paper explores how applying strain to a frustrated kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet can induce new magnetic phases, including spin liquids, spin glasses, and ordered states, by tuning degeneracies and ground states.

Contribution

It demonstrates that strain can be used to control and induce novel phases in highly frustrated magnetic systems, providing theoretical predictions and analysis.

Findings

Weak strain reduces degeneracy, leading to a classical spin liquid.

Stronger strain induces a state with both spin-glass and long-range order signatures.

Predictions for magnetic structure factor and excitation spectrum are provided.

Abstract

Strain applied to a condensed-matter system can be used to engineer its excitation spectrum via artificial gauge fields, or it may tune the system through transitions between different phases. Here we demonstrate that strain tuning of the ground state of otherwise highly degenerate frustrated systems can induce novel phases, both ordered and disordered. For the classical Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the kagome lattice, we show that weak triaxial strain reduces the degeneracies of the system, leading to a classical spin liquid with non-coplanar configurations, while stronger strain drives the system into a highly unconventional state which displays signatures of both spin-glass behavior and magnetic long-range order. We provide experimentally testable predictions for the magnetic structure factor, characterize the ground-state degeneracies and the excitation spectrum, and analyze the influence of sample shape and boundaries. Our work opens the way to strain engineering of highly frustrated magnets.