Quantum magnetism in minerals

Abstract

The discovery of magnetism by the ancient Greeks was enabled by the natural occurrence of lodestone – a magnetized version of the mineral magnetite. Nowadays, natural minerals continue to inspire the search for novel magnetic materials with quantum-critical behaviour or exotic ground states such as spin liquids. The recent surge of interest in magnetic frustration and quantum magnetism was largely encouraged by crystalline structures of natural minerals realizing pyrochlore, kagome, or triangular arrangements of magnetic ions. As a result, names like azurite, jarosite, volborthite, and others, which were barely known beyond the mineralogical community a few decades ago, found their way into cutting-edge research in solid-state physics. In some cases, the structures of natural minerals are too complex to be synthesized artificially in a chemistry lab, especially in single-crystalline form, and there is a growing number of examples demonstrating the potential of natural specimens for experimental investigations in the field of quantum magnetism. On many other occasions, minerals may guide chemists in the synthesis of novel compounds with unusual magnetic properties. The present review attempts to embrace this quickly emerging interdisciplinary field that bridges mineralogy with low-temperature condensed-matter physics and quantum chemistry.

Keywords:

• quantum magnetism
• magnetic frustration
• low-dimensional spin models
• magnetic minerals

PACS:

• 75.30.-m – intrinsic properties of magnetically ordered materials
• 75.10.Jm – models of magnetic ordering
• including quantum spin frustration
• 91.60.Pn – magnetic properties of minerals

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank H. Rosner (MPI CPfS, Dresden) and K. Lefmann (Niels Bohr Institutet, Copenhagen) for stimulating discussions, as well as E. Kroke, J. Hunger, M. Schwarz, U. Bläß, and Th. Schlothauer for the inspiration gained from visiting the mineral collection at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. I also thank A.S. Cameron for a thorough proofreading of the manuscript and A.A. Tsirlin for very helpful critical suggestions on its content.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

D.S. Inosov  http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0639-2503

Notes

1 Alternative naming for polymorphs based on the chronological order of their discovery can also be found in the literature [380], but the one adopted here is by far the most common [372,379,381–383].

Additional information

Funding

This work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1143 in Dresden (project C03) and the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence on Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter – ct.qmat (EXC 2147, project-id 39085490).