Detail Cantuman

Quantum m agnetism in m inerals
D.S. Inosov ∗
Institut für Festkörper- und Materialphysik, TU Dresden, 01069 Dresden, Germany
(Received 27 June 2018; accepted 14 January 2019)
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.
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
Keywords: quantum magnetism; magnetic frustration; low-dimensional spin models;
magnetic minerals