Spiral Spin Liquid in a Frustrated Honeycomb Antiferromagnet: A Single-Crystal Study of GdZnPO.

The frustrated honeycomb spin model can stabilize a subextensively degenerate spiral spin liquid with nontrivial topological excitations and defects, but its material realization remains rare. Here, we report the experimental realization of this model in the structurally disorder-free compound GdZnPO. Using a single-crystal sample, we find that spin-7/2 rare-earth Gd^{3+} ions form a honeycomb lattice with dominant second-nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic and first-nearest-neighbor ferromagnetic couplings, along with easy-plane single-site anisotropy.

Quantum annealing of a frustrated magnet.

Quantum annealing, which involves quantum tunnelling among possible solutions, has state-of-the-art applications not only in quickly finding the lowest-energy configuration of a complex system, but also in quantum computing. Here we report a single-crystal study of the frustrated magnet α-CoVO, consisting of a triangular arrangement of ferromagnetic Ising spin chains without evident structural disorder. We observe quantum annealing phenomena resulting from time-reversal symmetry breaking in a tiny transverse field.

Frustrated magnetism of the spin-1 kagome antiferromagnet-BaNi(VO)(OH).

We propose the newly synthesized-BaNi(VO)(OH)(space group:R3‾m) as a candidate for the spin-1 kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet (KHA). The compound features a uniform kagome lattice of Ni(= 1) ions with a large interlayer distance. High-field measurements at low temperatures reveal a susceptibility local minimum at ∼9 T, resembling a 1/3 magnetization plateau as predicted by the pure= 1 KHA model.