Paper detail

Quantum Spin Liquids Stabilized by Disorder in Non-Kramers Pyrochlores

We investigate the emergence of quantum spin liquid phases in pyrochlore oxides with non-Kramers ions, in which structural randomness effectively acts as a transverse field, introducing quantum fluctuations on top of the spin ice manifold. This is contrary to the naive expectation that disorder favors phases with short-range entanglement by adjusting the spins with their local environment. We study a minimal model for a disordered quantum spin ice, the transverse-field Ising model, using a real-space formulation of the gauge mean-field theory. This approach allows the inclusion of non-perturbative disorder effects exactly, and thus to assess the stability of the spin-liquid phase with respect to the disorder. The analysis shows that the quantum spin ice remains remarkably stable with respect to disorder up to the transition to the polarized phase at high fields, indicating that it can occur in real materials. A Griffiths region of enhanced disorder-induced fluctuations is restricted to the immediate vicinity of this transition due to the peculiar nature of the low-energy excitations of the problem. For most of the phase diagram, an average description of the disorder captures the physical behavior well, indicating that the inhomogeneous quantum spin ice behaves closely to its homogeneous counterpart.