Ripple of Electronic Clouds

Abstract

  We investigated the magnetic excitations and lattice vibrations in a spinel-type vanadium oxide MnV₂O₄ by using inelastic neutron and x-ray scattering. We discovered magnetic excitations which were not reproduced by the linear spin-wave calculation. We also confirmed that the excitation modes were not explained by the simple lattice vibration, since the dispersion and the scattering intensity are different from those obtained from inelastic neutron scattering experiment. Therefore, we proposed that the observed excitation was related to the orbital excitation mode coupling with the spin-wave excitation via spin-orbital exchange interaction and the relativistic spin-orbit interaction.