Some of the interest was motivated by the large thermopower, spin frustration associated with the underlying triangular lattice, and superconductivity from water!
Jaime Merino, Ben Powell, and I wrote several papers on the subject. At the cake meeting today we reviewed two papers which focused on the doping x=0.5.
Electronic and magnetic properties of the ionic Hubbard model on the striped triangular lattice at 3/4 filling
Ionic Hubbard model on a triangular lattice for Na0.5CoO2, Rb0.5CoO2, and K0.5CoO2: Mean-field slave boson theory
The latter features some really cool movies.
Here are some of the outstanding questions raised by the strange ground state of the x=0.5 material. It appears to be an insulator, with a small amount of charge order, a large magnetic moment which antiferromagnetically orders, and very small Fermi surface which produces quantum oscillations.
All these properties cannot be described by the strong coupling ground state [an antiferromagnetic insulator with charge order] shown below.
What is the ground state of the ionic Hubbard model on the triangular lattice at 3/4 filling for small Delta/t where Delta=measure of ionicity between the two sublattices?
Is it a covalent insulator? Does such a state have experimental signatures which are distinct from a charge ordered insulator?
How can an "insulating" state co-exist with a very small Fermi surface?
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