Publication Date:
2012-09-22
Description:
The low-temperature states of bosonic fluids exhibit fundamental quantum effects at the macroscopic scale: the best-known examples are Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity, which have been tested experimentally in a variety of different systems. When bosons interact, disorder can destroy condensation, leading to a 'Bose glass'. This phase has been very elusive in experiments owing to the absence of any broken symmetry and to the simultaneous absence of a finite energy gap in the spectrum. Here we report the observation of a Bose glass of field-induced magnetic quasiparticles in a doped quantum magnet (bromine-doped dichloro-tetrakis-thiourea-nickel, DTN). The physics of DTN in a magnetic field is equivalent to that of a lattice gas of bosons in the grand canonical ensemble; bromine doping introduces disorder into the hopping and interaction strength of the bosons, leading to their localization into a Bose glass down to zero field, where it becomes an incompressible Mott glass. The transition from the Bose glass (corresponding to a gapless spin liquid) to the Bose-Einstein condensate (corresponding to a magnetically ordered phase) is marked by a universal exponent that governs the scaling of the critical temperature with the applied field, in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions. Our study represents a quantitative experimental account of the universal features of disordered bosons in the grand canonical ensemble.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Yu, Rong -- Yin, Liang -- Sullivan, Neil S -- Xia, J S -- Huan, Chao -- Paduan-Filho, Armando -- Oliveira, Nei F Jr -- Haas, Stephan -- Steppke, Alexander -- Miclea, Corneliu F -- Weickert, Franziska -- Movshovich, Roman -- Mun, Eun-Deok -- Scott, Brian L -- Zapf, Vivien S -- Roscilde, Tommaso -- England -- Nature. 2012 Sep 20;489(7416):379-84. doi: 10.1038/nature11406.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22996552" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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