Role of Orbitals in Manganese Oxides - Ordering and Fluctuation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how orbital degrees of freedom influence magnetic ordering and charge transport in manganese oxides, revealing their role in dimensionality control, phase transitions, and anomalous physical properties.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model linking orbital ordering, magnetic phases, and electron interactions, explaining experimental observations and proposing dynamical phase separation as a key mechanism.

Findings

Magnetic structure changes with doping as predicted and observed experimentally.

Orbital alignment explains quasi 2D transport and absence of spin canting.

Dynamical phase separation accounts for anomalous physical properties.

Abstract

We study the manganese oxides from the viewpoint of the strongly correlated doped Mott insulator. The magnetic ordering and the charge transport are governed by the orbital degrees of freedom, and their dimensionality is controlled by the anisotropic transfer integrals between the $e_g$ orbitals. As x increases the magnetic structure is predicted to change as $A \to F \to A \to C \to G$ (F: ferromagnet, A: layered antiferromagnet, C: rod-type antiferromagnet, G: usual antiferromagnet), in agreement with experiments. Especially the orbital is aligned as $d_{x^2-y^2}$ in the metallic A state, which explains the quasi 2D transport and no canting of the spin observed experimentally. Next we discuss the ferromagnetic state without the orbital ordering due to the quantum fluctuation. Here the interplay between the electron repulsion U and the Jahn-Teller electron-phonon interation $E_{LR}$ is studied with a large d model. In addition to this strong correlation, we propose that the dynamical phase separation could explain the specific heat as well as the various anomalous physical properties, e.g., resistivity, photo-emission, etc.