Thursday, December 8, 2011

Deconstructing sodium cobaltate

Sodium cobaltate (NaxCoO2) is a strongly correlated electron material which achieved a lot of attention before the mass migration to the new iron pnictide superconductors following their discovery around 2008.
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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