Order-by-disorder from bond-dependent exchange and intensity signature of nodal quasiparticles in a honeycomb cobaltate

M. Elliot, P. A. McClarty, D. Prabhakaran, R. D. Johnson, H. C. Walker, P. Manuel and R. Coldea ()
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M. Elliot: University of Oxford
P. A. McClarty: Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems
D. Prabhakaran: University of Oxford
R. D. Johnson: University College London
H. C. Walker: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory-STFC
P. Manuel: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory-STFC
R. Coldea: University of Oxford

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Recent theoretical proposals have argued that cobaltates with edge-sharing octahedral coordination can have significant bond-dependent exchange couplings thus offering a platform in 3d ions for such physics beyond the much-explored realisations in 4d and 5d materials. Here we present high-resolution inelastic neutron scattering data within the magnetically ordered phase of the stacked honeycomb magnet CoTiO3 revealing the presence of a finite energy gap and demonstrate that this implies the presence of bond-dependent anisotropic couplings. We also show through an extensive theoretical analysis that the gap further implies the existence of a quantum order-by-disorder mechanism that, in this material, crucially involves virtual crystal field fluctuations. Our data also provide an experimental observation of a universal winding of the scattering intensity in angular scans around linear band-touching points for both magnons and dispersive spin-orbit excitons, which is directly related to the non-trivial topology of the quasiparticle wavefunction in momentum space near nodal points.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23851-0

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