A parity-breaking electronic nematic phase transition in the spin-orbit coupled metal Cd₂Re₂O₇
Abstract
Strong electron interactions can drive metallic systems toward a variety of well-known symmetry-broken phases, but the instabilities of correlated metals with strong spin-orbit coupling have only recently begun to be explored. We uncovered a multipolar nematic phase of matter in the metallic pyrochlore Cd₂Re₂O₇ using spatially resolved second-harmonic optical anisotropy measurements. Like previously discovered electronic nematic phases, this multipolar phase spontaneously breaks rotational symmetry while preserving translational invariance. However, it has the distinguishing property of being odd under spatial inversion, which is allowed only in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. By examining the critical behavior of the multipolar nematic order parameter, we show that it drives the thermal phase transition near 200 kelvin in Cd₂Re₂O₇ and induces a parity-breaking lattice distortion as a secondary order.
Additional Information
© 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 19 October 2016; accepted 20 March 2017. We thank J. P. Eisenstein, L. Fu, T. Hsieh, P. A. Lee, A. de la Torre, and L. Zhao for useful discussions. RA-SHG experiments were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DE-SC0010533. Instrumentation for the RA-SHG setup was partially supported by a U.S. Army Research Office Defense University Research Instrumentation Program award under grant W911NF-13-1-0293 and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under grant FG-BR2014-027. D.H. also acknowledges funding from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, a NSF Physics Frontiers Center (PHY-1125565) with support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through grant GBMF1250. J.-Q.Y. and D.G.M. were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. Z.Y.Z. acknowledges the Center for Emergent Materials and NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center under grant DMR-1420451. D.H. and D. H. Torchinsky are inventors on U.S. patent application #14/705,831 submitted by the California Institute of Technology, which covers a spectrometer apparatus for the study of the crystallographic and electronic symmetries of crystals and methods of using said apparatus. The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Attached Files
Submitted - 1704.07399.pdf
Supplemental Material - aad1188_Harter_SM.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- A parity-breaking electronic nematic phase transition in the spin-orbit coupled metal Cd2Re2O7
- Eprint ID
- 76787
- DOI
- 10.1126/science.aad1188
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170420-145037343
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-SC0010533
- Army Research Office (ARO)
- W911NF-13-1-0293
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- FG-BR2014-027
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM)
- NSF
- PHY-1125565
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- GBMF1250
- NSF
- DMR-1420451
- Created
-
2017-04-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-02-28Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter