New Quantum Materials with Spin Liquid Ground States

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This NSERC Alliance International Catalyst Quantum Program application New Quantum Materials with Spin Liquid Ground States is intended to initiate a comprehensive program of quantum materials discovery, refinement and advanced characterization which will allow new materials with entangled quantum spin liquid ground states to be identified and ultimately understood. These new materials will be discovered, synthesized and refined using geometrical frustration as a key design principle. This principle is based on the incorporation of crystalline architectures based on interconnected triangles, tetrahedra, and honeycomb structures, into the overall structure of new materials. These magnetic moments and other interacting electronic degrees of freedom reside on these architectures and act to "frustrate" well established ordered states of matter, such as simple ferro and anti ferromagnetism. New materials with such ground states are theoretically known to possesses elementary excitations which can display statistics distinct from the fermions and bosons that characterize traditional materials. Such distinctly quantum characteristics underly their remarkable low temperature properties. This NSERC Alliance International Catalyst Quantum Program brings together three research groups in Canada, the UK and France, with complementary and high level expertise and infrastructure, and which will allow such a comprehensive program of quantum materials research to be carried out from initiation to completion. This collaborative research program is inherently interdisciplinary, as it requires exploration and discovery of new quantum materials, the growth of polycrystalline and single crystal samples of the materials of interest, followed by advanced characterization by neutron scattering, nuclear magnetic resonance, and muSR techniques. Its international dimension will better integrate Canada's quantum materials activities with European large scale facilities for advanced characterization using neutron scattering and muSR techniques.