Biaxial spin-nematic phase of two-dimensional disordered rotor models and S=1 Bosons in optical lattices

Abstract

We show that the ground state of disordered rotor models with quadrupolar interactions can exhibit biaxial nematic ordering in the disorder-averaged sense. We present a mean-field analysis of the model and demonstrate that the biaxial phase is stable against small quantum fluctuations. We point out the possibility of experimental realization of such rotor models using ultracold spin-1 Bose atoms in a spin-dependent and disordered optical lattice in the limit of a large number of atoms per site and also suggest an imaging experiment to detect the biaxial nematicity in such systems.