Magnetic Excitations and Electronic Interactions in Sr2CuTeO6: A Spin-1/2 Square Lattice Heisenberg Antiferromagnet

Sr2CuTeO6 presents an opportunity for exploring low-dimensional magnetism on a square lattice of S = 1/2 Cu2+ ions. We employ ab initio multireference configuration interaction calculations to unravel the Cu2+ electronic structure and to evaluate exchange interactions in Sr2CuTeO6. The latter results are validated by inelastic neutron scattering using linear spin-wave theory and series-expansion corrections for quantum effects to extract true coupling parameters. Using this methodology, which is quite general, we demonstrate that Sr2CuTeO6 is an almost ideal realization of a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg antiferromagnet but with relatively weak coupling of 7.18(5) meV.