Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.
DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.
Although the search for quantum many-body phenomena in magnetic materials has a strong focus on highly frustrated systems, even unfrustrated quantum magnets show a multitude of unconventional phenomena in their spin excitation spectra. YbBr3 is an excellent realization of the S=1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the honeycomb lattice, and we have performed detailed spectroscopic experiments with both unpolarized and polarized neutrons at all applied magnetic fields up to saturation. We observe extensive excitation continua, which cause strong renormalization and the decay of single magnons at higher fields, while coherent features include field-induced “shadows” of the single magnons and the spectacular emergence of a rotonlike excitation. To guide and interpret our experiments, we performed systematic calculations by the method of cylinder matrix-product states that provide quantitative agreement with the neutron scattering data and a qualitative benchmark for the spectral signatures of strong quantum fluctuations even in the absence of magnetic frustration.