https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00649-5
Regular Article
A 
pseudospinon continuum in 
1
ESRF – The European Synchrotron, 71 Avenue des Martyrs, CS 40220, 38043, Grenoble, France
2
Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy
3
Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo, 277-8581, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan
4
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trento, Via Sommarive 14, 38123, Povo, TN, Italy
5
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Pasteura 5, 02093, Warsaw, Poland
6
Institute for Theoretical Solid State Physics, IFW Dresden, Helmholtzstrasse 20, 01069, Dresden, Germany
7
Department of Physics, Technical University Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany
8
Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, 94025, Menlo Park, CA, USA
9
Department of Applied Physics, National Defense Academy of Japan, 1-10-20 Hashirimizu, 239–8686, Yokosuka, Kanagawa, Japan
10
Department of Physics, Tohoku University, 6-3 Aramaki-Aoba, Aoba-ku, 980-8578, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan
Received:
11
June
2020
Accepted:
29
July
2020
Published online:
26
August
2020
In so-called 
systems, including some iridates and ruthenates, the coherent superposition of 
orbitals in the ground state gives rise to hopping processes that strongly depend on the bond geometry. Resonant inelastic X-ray scattering measurements on CaIrO
reveal a prototypical pseudospinon continuum, a hallmark of one-dimensional (1D) magnetic systems despite its three-dimensional crystal structure. The experimental spectra compare very well to the calculated magnetic dynamical structure factor of weakly coupled spin-1/2 chains. We attribute the onset of such quasi-1D magnetism to the fundamental difference in the magnetic interactions between the pseudospins along the corner- and edge-sharing bonds in CaIrO.
© Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
