Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 10, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10405-8
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Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Center for Quantum Materials at the University of Toronto
- Sharcnet
- Compute Canada
- Canada Foundation for Innovation under Compute Canada
- Ontario Research Fund-Research Excellence
- University of Toronto
- Government of Ontario
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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 alpha-RuCl3. 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 anti-ferromagnetic 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.
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