Quantum Café is CCQ’s ongoing seminar series: open to all bona fide members of the greater NYC scientific community and held every second week, Quantum Café presents a series of informal, highly interactive talks, typically by external speakers, which present the most interesting recent developments and open questions in our field.
Title: Frustrated Quantum Magnetics and the Quest for Spin-Liquids
Abstract: Mott insulators are prototypical quantum materials. They often host magnetic phases and excitations of great fundamental interest. In spin-liquids, correlated yet fluctuating states of magnetic matter, exotic behavior can be stabilized by materials ingredients such as dimensionality, geometrical frustration, spin-orbit coupling, disorder or their combination. In this talk, I will describe how neutron scattering quantitatively probes magnetic correlations and dynamics in crystalline matter. I will present recent examples of triangular, kagome, and pyrochlore materials with unusual low-temperature properties and discuss how the combination of computer modeling and scattering can elucidate their microscopic collective behavior.