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Effect of magnetic frustration on nematicity and superconductivity in iron chalcogenides

Nature Physics volume 11, pages 953–958 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Over the past few years iron chalcogenides have been intensively studied as part of the wider family of iron-based superconductors, with many intriguing results reported so far on intercalated and monolayer FeSe. Nevertheless, bulk FeSe itself remains an unusual case when compared with pnictogen-based iron superconductors, and may hold clues to understanding the more exotic derivatives of the FeSe system. The FeSe phase diagram is distinct from the pnictides: the orthorhombic distortion, which is likely to be of a ‘spin-nematic’ nature in numerous pnictides, is not accompanied by magnetic order in FeSe, and the superconducting transition temperature Tc rises significantly with pressure before decreasing. Here we show that the magnetic interactions in FeSe, as opposed to most pnictides, demonstrate an unusual and unanticipated frustration, which suppresses magnetic (but not nematic) order, triggers ferro-orbital order in the nematic phase and can naturally explain the non-monotonic pressure dependence of the superconducting critical temperature Tc(P).

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Figure 1: Collinear magnetic structures used for fitting the J1–J2–J3–K model.
Figure 2: Classical mean-field phase diagrams.
Figure 3: Energies of collinear magnetic configurations.
Figure 4: Energies, density of states at ɛF and orbital order of FeSe at 0 GPa pressure.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Tomić for running some test calculations at the initial stages of this work and D. Guterding, S. Backes, A. Coldea, A. Chubukov, N. Perkins, S. Kivelson and W. Ku for valuable discussions. I.I.M. is supported by ONR through the NRL Basic Research Program. J.K.G. acknowledges the support of the NRC Program at NRL. H.O.J. and R.V. are supported by DFG-SPP1458. P.J.H. was partially supported by US DOE DE-FG02-05ER46236. R.M.F. is supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under award number DE-SC0012336. I.I.M., R.V. and P.J.H. were supported in part by KITP under NSF grant PHY11-25915.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Research Council/Code 6393, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC 20375, USA

    J. K. Glasbrenner

  2. Code 6393, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC 20375, USA

    I. I. Mazin

  3. Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Harald O. Jeschke & Roser Valentí

  4. Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA

    P. J. Hirschfeld

  5. School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA

    R. M. Fernandes

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  1. J. K. Glasbrenner
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Contributions

I.I.M. and J.K.G. conceived the research; J.K.G., I.I.M. and H.O.J. carried out numerical calculations; R.M.F. carried out analytical calculations for the phenomenological model; all authors participated in the discussion and contributed to writing the paper; I.I.M. and R.V. supervised the whole project.

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Correspondence to J. K. Glasbrenner.

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Glasbrenner, J., Mazin, I., Jeschke, H. et al. Effect of magnetic frustration on nematicity and superconductivity in iron chalcogenides. Nature Phys 11, 953–958 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3434

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