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Anomalous thermal conductivity and magnetic torque response in the honeycomb magnet $alpha$-RuCl$_3$

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 نشر من قبل Minhyea Lee
 تاريخ النشر 2016
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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We report on the unusual behavior of the in-plane thermal conductivity ($kappa$) and torque ($tau$) response in the Kitaev-Heisenberg material $alpha$-RuCl$_3$. $kappa$ shows a striking enhancement with linear growth beyond H = 7 T, where magnetic order disappears, while $tau$ for both of the in-plane symmetry directions shows an anomaly at the same field. The temperature- and field-dependence of $kappa$ are far more complex than conventional phonon and magnon contributions, and require us to invoke the presence of unconventional spin excitations whose properties are characteristic of a field-induced spin-liquid phase related to the enigmatic physics of the Kitaev model in an applied magnetic field



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We have investigated the longitudinal thermal conductivity of $alpha$-RuCl$_{3}$, the magnetic state of which is considered to be proximate to a Kitaev honeycomb model, along with the spin susceptibility and magnetic specific heat. We found that the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity exhibits an additional peak around 100 K, which is well above the phonon peak temperature ($sim$ 50 K). The higher-temperature peak position is comparable to the temperature scale of the Kitaev couplings rather than the Neel temperatures below 15 K. The additional heat conduction was observed for all five samples used in this study, and was found to be rather immune to a structural phase transition of $alpha$-RuCl$_{3}$, which suggests its different origin from phonons. Combined with experimental results of the magnetic specific heat, our transport measurement suggests strongly that the higher-temperature peak in the thermal conductivity is attributed to itinerant spin excitations associated with the Kitaev couplings of $alpha$-RuCl$_{3}$. A kinetic approximation of the magnetic thermal conductivity yields a mean free path of $sim$ 20 nm at 100 K, which is well longer than the nearest Ru-Ru distance ($sim$ 3 AA), suggesting the long-distance coherent propagation of magnetic excitations driven by the Kitaev couplings.
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In the class of materials called spin liquids, a magnetically ordered state cannot be attained even at milliKelvin temperatures because of conflicting constraints on each spin (for e.g. from geometric or exchange frustration). The resulting quantum s pin-liquid (QSL) state is currently of intense interest because it exhibits novel excitations as well as wave-function entanglement. The layered insulator $alpha$-RuCl$_3$ orders as a zigzag antiferromagnet below $sim$7 K in zero magnetic field. The zigzag order is destroyed when a magnetic field $bf H$ is applied parallel to the zigzag axis a. Within the field interval (7.3, 11) Tesla, there is growing evidence that a QSL state exists. Here we report the observation of oscillations in its thermal conductivity below 4 K. The oscillation amplitude is very large within the interval (7.3, 11) T and strongly suppressed on either side. Paradoxically, the oscillations are periodic in 1/emph{H}, analogous to quantum oscillations in metals, even though $alpha$-RuCl$_3$ is an excellent insulator with a gap of 1.9 eV. By tilting $bf H$ out of the plane, we find that the oscillation period is determined by the in-plane component $H_a$. As the temperature is raised above 0.5 K, the oscillation amplitude decreases exponentially. The decrease anticorrelates with the emergence above $sim$2 K of an anomalous planar thermal Hall conductivity measured with $bf Hparallel a$. To exclude extrinsic artifacts, we carried out several tests. The implications of the oscillations are discussed.
146 - T. Yokoi , S. Ma , Y. Kasahara 2020
Heat transport mediated by Majorana edge modes in a magnetic insulator leads to a half-integer thermal quantum Hall conductance, which has recently been reported for the two-dimensional honeycomb material $alpha$-RuCl$_3$. While the conventional elec tronic Hall effect requires a perpendicular magnetic field, we find that this is not the case in $alpha$-RuCl$_3$. Strikingly, the thermal Hall plateau appears even for a magnetic field with no out-of-plane components. The field-angular variation of the quantized thermal Hall conductance has the same sign structure of the topological Chern number, which is either $pm$1, as the Majorana band structure of the pure Kitaev spin liquid. This observation of a half-integer anomalous thermal Hall effect firmly establishes that the Kitaev interaction is primarily responsible and that the non-Abelian topological order associated with fractionalization of the local magnetic moments persists even in the presence of non-Kitaev interactions in $alpha$-RuCl$_3$.
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