Abstract
Spin ice physics marries that of hydrogen disorder in water ice, first discussed almost 60 years ago by Pauling, and that of low temperature magnetism on certain networks of connected tetrahedra. Recently the classical spin ice mag- nets Ho2Ti2O7 and Dy2Ti2O7 have shown an emergent “artificial magneto- statics”, which manifests itself as Coulombic spin correlations and excitations behaving as diffusive magnetic monopoles. The related pyrochlore magnet, Tb2Ti2O7, has been proposed as a quantum variant of spin ice, stabilized by
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virtual excitations between the crystal field (CF) ground state doublet appro- priate to Tb3+, and its low lying excited state doublet. Isostructural Tb2Sn2O7 displays “soft” spin ice order, and its Tb3+ ground and excited CF eigenstates are known to differ relative to those of Tb2Ti2O7. We present a comprehensive study of Tb2Sn2−xTixO7 showing a novel, dynamic spin liquid state for all x other than the end members (0, 2). This state is the result of disorder in the low lying Tb3+ CF environments which de-stabilizes the mechanism by which quantum fluctuations contribute to ground state selection in Tb2Sn2−xTixO7.
