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Phys Rev Lett. 2015 Jul 10;115(2):025701. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.025701. Epub 2015 Jul 08.

Glassy Dynamics in Geometrically Frustrated Coulomb Liquids without Disorder.

Physical review letters

Samiyeh Mahmoudian, Louk Rademaker, Arnaud Ralko, Simone Fratini, Vladimir Dobrosavljević

Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA.
  2. Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
  3. Institut Néel-CNRS and Université Joseph Fourier, Boîte Postale 166, F-38042 Grenoble Cedex 9, France.

PMID: 26207481 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.025701

Abstract

We show that introducing long-range Coulomb interactions immediately lifts the massive ground state degeneracy induced by geometric frustration for electrons on quarter-filled triangular lattices in the classical limit. Important consequences include the stabilization of a stripe-ordered crystalline (global) ground state, but also the emergence of very many low-lying metastable states with amorphous "stripe-glass" spatial structures. Melting of the stripe order thus leads to a frustrated Coulomb liquid at intermediate temperatures, showing remarkably slow (viscous) dynamics, with very long relaxation times growing in Arrhenius fashion upon cooling, as typical of strong glass formers. On shorter time scales, the system falls out of equilibrium and displays the aging phenomena characteristic of supercooled liquids above the glass transition. Our results show remarkable similarity with the recent observations of charge-glass behavior in ultraclean triangular organic materials of the θ-(BEDT-TTF)(2) family.

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