We consider a series of Mott insulators in unit of two orbitals each hosting spin-1/2 electron, and by pairing two spin-1/2 into spin-1 triplet, derive the effective exchange interaction between the adjacent units via fourth order perturbation theory. It turns out that the biquadratic exchange interaction between spin-1, which is one of the origins of the nematic order, arises only in processes where the four different electrons exchange cyclically along the twisted loop, which we call "twisted ring exchange" processes. We show that the term becomes the same order with the Heisenberg exchange interactions when the on-orbital Coulomb interaction is not too large. Whereas, the inter-orbital Coulomb interactions give rise to additional processes that cancel the twisted ring exchange, and strongly suppresses the biquadratic term. The Mott insulator with two electrons on degenerate two orbitals is thus not an ideal platform to study such nematic orders.
We provide a route to generate nematic order in a spin-1/2 system. Unlike the well-known magnon-binding mechanism, our spin nematics requires neither the frustration effect nor spin polarization in a high field or in the vicinity of a ferromagnet, but instead appears next to the spin singlet phase. We start from a state consisting of a quantum spin-1/2 singlet dimer placed on each site of a triangular lattice, and show that interdimer ring exchange interactions efficiently dope the SU(2) triplets that itinerate and interact, easily driving a stable singlet state to either Bose-Einstein condensates or a triplet crystal, some hosting a spin nematic order. A variety of roles the ring exchange serves includes the generation of a bilinear-biquadratic interaction between nearby triplets, which is responsible for the emergent nematic order separated from the singlet phase by a first-order transition.
We study the interplay of strong electron correlations and intratriangle spin exchange at two-thirds filling of the single-orbital Hubbard model on the decorated honeycomb lattice using rotationally invariant slave bosons. We find that the spin exchange tunes between a spin-1 Mott insulator, a metal, and a spin-0 Mott insulator when the exchange is antiferromagnetic. The Mott insulators occur from effective intratriangle multiorbital interactions and are adiabatically connected to the ground state of an isolated triangle. An antiferromagnetic spin exchange, as determined by the Goodenough-Kanamori rules, may occur in coordination polymers from kinetic exchange via the ligands. We characterize the magnetism in the regime where spin triplets dominate. For small
U a spin-1 Slater insulator occurs with antiferromagnetic order between triangles. Magnetism in the spin-1 Mott insulator is described by a spin-1 Heisenberg model on a honeycomb lattice, whose ground state is N\'eel ordered.
In order to have a better understanding of ultrafast electrical control of exchange interactions in multi-orbital systems, we study a two-orbital Hubbard model at half filling under the action of a time-periodic electric field. Using suitable projection operators and a generalized time-dependent canonical transformation, we derive an effective Hamiltonian which describes two different regimes. First, for a wide range of non-resonant frequencies, we find a change of the bilinear Heisenberg exchange J_{\textrm{ex}} J ex that is analogous to the single-orbital case. Moreover we demonstrate that also the additional biquadratic exchange interaction B_{\textrm{ex}} B ex can be enhanced, reduced and even change sign depending on the electric field. Second, for special driving frequencies, we demonstrate a novel spin-charge coupling phenomenon enabling coherent transfer between spin and charge degrees of freedom of doubly ionized states. These results are confirmed by an exact time-evolution of the full two-orbital Mott-Hubbard Hamiltonian.
The four-spin operators are suspected to have a significant amplitude and an impact on the collective properties in spin ladders and magnetic two-dimensional lattices. They originate from cyclic circulation of electrons (ring currents). Starting from a simple Hubbard Hamiltonian one may establish their form from a fourth order expansion of quasidegenerate perturbation theory. This form slightly deviates from the generally assumed biquadratic expression. From a quantitative point of view, their amplitude can be assessed from accurate ab initio explicitly correlated wave functions and energies on embedded clusters. The present work shows that symmetry-broken density functional theory calculations may also provide estimates of the four-body operator amplitudes, but reliable results require the use of a large Fock component in the exchange functional.
There is a version of the Landau–Lifshitz equation that takes into account the Coulomb exchange interactions between atoms, expressed by the term
∼s×△s . On the other hand, ions in magnetic materials have several valence electrons on the
d -shell, and, therefore, the Hamiltonian of many-electron atoms with spins
S>1 should include a biquadratic exchange interaction. We propose a novel fundamental microscopic derivation of the spin density evolution equation with an explicit form of biquadratic exchange interaction using the method of many-particle quantum hydrodynamics. The equation for the spin density evolution is obtained from the many-particle Schrödinger–Pauli equation and contains the contributions of the usual Coulomb exchange interaction and the biquadratic exchange. Furthermore, the derived biquadratic exchange torque in the spin density evolution equation is proportional to the nematic tensor for the medium of atoms with spin
S=1 . Our method may be very attractive for further studies of the magnetoelectric effect in multiferroics.
In the search for quantum spin liquids, candidate materials for the Kitaev model and its extensions have been intensively explored during the past decade, as the models realize the exact quantum spin liquids in the ground state. Thus far, insulating magnets in the low-spin
d5 electron configuration under the strong spin-orbit coupling have been studied for realizing the Kitaev-type bond-dependent anisotropic interactions between the spin-orbital entangled Kramers doublets. To extend the candidates, here we investigate the systems in a high-spin
d7 electron configuration, whose ground state is described by the spin-orbital entangled Kramers doublet. By the second-order perturbation in terms of the ${t}_{2g}\ensuremath{-}{t}_{2g}$ and ${t}_{2g}\ensuremath{-}{e}_{g}$ hoppings, we show that the effective spin model possesses the anisotropic Kitaev interactions as well as the isotropic Heisenberg ones. While the Kitaev interaction is always ferromagnetic, the Heisenberg interaction can become either ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic depending on the Coulomb interactions and the crystalline electric fields. We also derive the effective model for the low-spin
d5 electron configuration within the same perturbation scheme, in which the Kitaev interaction becomes both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic, while the Heisenberg one is always ferromagnetic. Referring to the previous study for the Kitaev-Heisenberg model, we find that the quantum spin liquid phase exists in the reasonable parameter region in both
d7 and
d5 cases, while the former has a richer structure of the phase diagram. We discuss the advantages of the
d7 case in comparison with the
d5 case. Our results indicate that the high-spin
d7 state provides another platform for the Kitaev-type quantum spin liquid.