Statistics of spinons in the spin-liquid phase of Cs2CuCl4

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spin dynamics in the spin-liquid phase of Cs2CuCl4, comparing bosonic and fermionic spinon models, and analyzing their temperature-dependent predictions against experimental data.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of bosonic and fermionic spinon theories for Cs2CuCl4's spin-liquid phase, highlighting differences in temperature-dependent spin structure factors.

Findings

Both theories agree qualitatively with experiments at zero temperature.

Significant differences emerge in the temperature dependence of the spin structure factor.

The study helps distinguish between competing spin-liquid models based on temperature behavior.

Abstract

Motivated by a recent experiment on Cs2CuCl4, we study the spin dynamics of the spin-liquid phase of the spin-1/2 frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the anisotropic triangular lattice. There have been two different proposals for the spin-liquid phase of Cs2CuCl4. These spin-liquid states support different statistics of spinons; the bosonic Sp(N) large-N mean field theory predicts bosonic spinons while the SU(2) slave-boson mean field theory leads to fermionic spinons. We compute the dynamical spin structure factor for both types of spin-liquid state at zero and finite temperatures. While at zero temperature both theories agree with experiment on a qualitative level, they show substantial differences in the temperature dependence of the dynamical spin structure factor.