The realization of Kitaev spin liquid, where spins on a honeycomb lattice are coupled ferromagnetically by bond-dependent anisotropic interactions, has been a sought-after dream. 5d iridium oxides $alpha$-Li2IrO3 and $alpha$-Na2IrO3 with a honeycomb lattice of Jeff = 1/2 moments recently emerged as a possible materialization. Strong signature of Kitaev physics, however, was not captured. Here we report the discovery of a complex iridium oxide $beta$-Li2IrO3 with Jeff = 1/2 moments on hyper-honeycomb lattice, a three-dimensional analogue of honeycomb lattice. A positive Curie-Weiss temperature $theta_{CW}$ ~ 40 K indicated dominant ferromagnetic interactions among Jeff = 1/2 moments in $beta$-Li2IrO3. A magnetic ordering with a small entropy change was observed at Tc = 38 K, which, with the application of magnetic field of only 3 T, changed to a fully polarized state of Jeff = 1/2 moments. Those results imply that hyper-honeycomb beta-Li2IrO3 is located in the vicinity to a Kitaev spin liquid.
The complex iridium oxide Na3Ir3O8 with a B-site ordered spinel structure was synthesized in single crystalline form, where the chiral hyper-kagome lattice of Ir atoms, as observed in the spin-liquid candidate Na4Ir3O8, was identified. The average valence of Ir is 4.33+ and, therefore, Na3Ir3O8 can be viewed as a doped analogue of the hyper-kagome spin liquid with Ir4+. The transport measurements showed that Na3Ir3O8 is in fact a semi-metal. The electronic structure calculation demonstrated that the strong spin-orbit coupling of Ir yields the semi-metallic state out of an otherwise band insulating state, which may harbor exotic topological effects embedded in the hyper-kagome lattice.
Ta2PdxS5 (x < 1.0) was found to show superconductivity at Tc ~ 6 K. The temperature dependent resistivity of single crystalline Ta2Pd0.92S5 showed that the system is strongly disordered due to Pd deficiencies and close to Anderson localized state. Superconductivity in the dirty limit as well as the temperature dependence of specific heat C(T) implies that superconductivity is s-wave. The upper critical field Hc2 at T = 0 K limit with the magnetic field parallel to the TaS6 chains was found to be as high as 31 T, exceeding the Pauli paramagnetic limit Hp = 10.2 T by a factor of 3. We argue that the absence of the paramagnetic pair-breaking originates from strong spin-orbit scattering due to Pd deficiencies embedded in the periodic lattice of heavy 5d Ta and 4d Pd.
We investigate the bilayer Ruddlesden-Popper iridate Sr$_3$Ir$_2$O$_7$ by temperature-dependent angle-resolved photoemission. We find a narrow-gap correlated insulator, with spectral features indicative of a polaronic ground state, strikingly similar to that observed previously for the parent compounds of the cuprate superconductors. We additionally observe similar behaviour for the single-layer cousin Sr$_2$IrO$_4$, indicating that strong electron-boson coupling dominates the low-energy excitations of this exotic family of materials, and providing a microscopic link between the insulating ground states of the seemingly-disparate 3d cuprates and 5d iridates.
Binary ruthenium pnictides, RuP and RuAs, with an orthorhombic MnP structure, were found to show a metal to a non-magnetic insulator transition at TMI = 270 K and 200 K, respectively. In the metallic region above TMI, a structural phase transition, accompanied by a weak anomaly in the resistivity and the magnetic susceptibility, indicative of a pseudo-gap formation, was identified at Ts = 330 K and 280 K, respectively. These two transitions were suppressed by substituting Ru with Rh. We found superconductivity with a maximum Tc = 3.7 K and Tc =1.8 K in a narrow composition range around the critical point for the pseudo-gap phase, Rh content xc = 0.45 and xc = 0.25 for Ru1-xRhxP and Ru1-xRhxAs, respectively, which may provide us with a novel non-magnetic route to superconductivity at a quantum critical point.
