Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 76
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-31033-y

Regular Article

Geometry fluctuations and Casimir effect in a quantum antiferromagnet

¹ Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, CNRS-UMR 8502, Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay, France
² Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 49, 1525 Budapest, Hungary

^a e-mail: jagannathan@lps.u-psud.fr

Received: 12 November 2012
Received in final form: 18 December 2012
Published online: 1 March 2013

Abstract

We show the presence of a Casimir type force between domain walls in a two dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet subject to geometrical fluctuations. The type of fluctuations that we consider, called phason flips, are well-known in quasicrystals, but less so in periodic structures. As the classical ground state energy of the antiferromagnet is unaffected by this type of fluctuation, energy changes are purely of quantum origin. We calculate the effective interaction between two parallel domain walls, defining a slab of thickness d, in such an antiferromagnet within linear spin wave theory. The interaction is anisotropic, and for a particular orientation of the slab we find that it decays as 1/d, thus, more slowly than the electromagnetic Casimir effect in the same geometry.