Lack of Evidence for a Singlet Crystal Field Ground State in the Tb2Ti2O7 Magnetic Pyrochlore
Abstract
We present new high resolution inelastic neutron scattering data on the
candidate spin liquid Tb2Ti2O7. We find that there is no evidence for a zero
field splitting of the ground state doublet within the 0.2 K resolution of the
instrument. This result contrasts with a pair of recent works on Tb2Ti2O7
claiming that the spin liquid behavior can be attributed to a 2 K split
singlet-singlet single-ion spectrum at low energies. We also reconsider the
entropy argument presented in Chapuis {\it et al.} as further evidence of a
singlet-singlet crystal field spectrum. We arrive at the conclusion that
estimates of the low temperature residual entropy drawn from heat capacity
measurements are a poor guide to the single ion spectrum without understanding
the nature of the correlations.