2019/01/28 by Jacob S. Gordon, Andrei Catuneanu, Erik S. Sørensen +1 · 2 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Antiferromagnetism #Boson #Ferromagnetism #Ground state #Magnetic field #Organic and Molecular Conductors Research #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum spin liquid #Spin (aerodynamics) #Spinon #Topological quantum computer #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41467-019-10405-8
published as Nature Communications 10, 2470 (2019) · 18 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2019/01/28 · openalex created_date 2019/02/21 · openalex publication_date 2019/06/06 · arxiv updated 2019/06/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract Elementary excitations in entangled states such as quantum spin liquids may exhibit exotic statistics different from those obeyed by fundamental bosons and fermions. Non-Abelian anyons exist in a Kitaev spin liquid—the ground state of an exactly solvable model. A smoking-gun signature of these excitations, namely a half-integer quantized thermal Hall conductivity, was recently reported in α -RuCl 3 . While fascinating, a microscopic theory for this phenomenon remains elusive because the pure Kitaev model cannot display this effect in an intermediate magnetic field. Here we present a microscopic theory of the Kitaev spin liquid emerging between the low- and high-field states. Essential to this result is an antiferromagnetic off-diagonal symmetric interaction which allows the Kitaev spin liquid to protrude from the ferromagnetic Kitaev limit under a magnetic field. This generic model displays a strong field anisotropy, and we predict a wide spin liquid regime when the field is perpendicular to the honeycomb plane.