Tuning the confinement potential between spinons in the Ising chain CoNb2O6 using longitudinal fields and quantitative determination of the microscopic Hamiltonian

TL;DR

This study experimentally tunes the confinement potential between spinons in the quasi-one-dimensional Ising ferromagnet CoNb2O6 using magnetic fields, revealing the evolution of bound states and providing a refined Hamiltonian model.

Contribution

It demonstrates control over spinon confinement in CoNb2O6 via magnetic fields and offers a quantitative Hamiltonian model matching experimental spectra.

Findings

Observation of spectrum evolution from weak to strong confinement

Identification of bound state disappearance at intermediate fields

Quantitative Hamiltonian model fitting all observed dispersions

Abstract

The Ising chain realizes the fundamental paradigm of spin fractionalization, where locally flipping a spin creates two domain walls (spinons) that can separate apart at no energy cost. In a quasi-one-dimensional system, the mean-field effects of the weak three-dimensional couplings confine the spinons into a Zeeman ladder of two-spinon bound states. Here, we experimentally tune the confinement potential between spinons in the quasi-one-dimensional Ising ferromagnet CoNb2O6 by means of an applied magnetic field with a large component along the Ising direction. Using high-resolution single crystal inelastic neutron scattering, we directly observe how the spectrum evolves from the limit of very weak confinement at low field (with many closely-spaced bound states with energies scaling as the field strength to the power 2/3) to very strong confinement at high field (where it consists of a magnon and a dispersive two-magnon bound state, with a linear field dependence). At intermediate fields, we explore how the higher-order bound states disappear from the spectrum as they move to higher energies and overlap with the two-particle continuum. By performing a global fit to the observed spectrum in zero field and high field applied along two orthogonal directions, combined with a quantitative parameterization of the interchain couplings, we propose a refined single chain and interchain Hamiltonian that quantitatively reproduces all observed dispersions and their field dependence.