Relaxation plateau in the breathing pyrochlore antiferromagnet LiIn0.05Ga0.95Cr4O8

In physics, frustration describes a situation where a system is unable to satisfy all of its internal interactions because of the geometry of its atomic structure. The most studied examples of frustration are magnetic systems containing triangular motifs; in these, conventional magnetism is often suppressed in favour of new, exotic states of magnetic matter. One such state has recently been observed for the first time in LiIn0.05Ga0.95Cr4O8, a material where the magnetic chromium ions form a lattice of tetrahedra. Below a temperature of 12 K, the magnetic moments suddenly become collinear without simultaneously ordering; this behaviour is similar to that of liquid crystals in display screens. It turns out that the interactions which generate the transition are also expected to support an unusual type of spin dynamics. It is these that we are aiming to observe with the proposed experiment