Incommensurate Spin Fluctuations in the Spin-Triplet Superconductor Candidate UTe2

Spin-triplet superconductors are of extensive current interest because they can host topological state and Majorana fermions important for quantum computation. The uranium-based heavy-fermion superconductor UTe2 has been argued as a spin-triplet superconductor similar to UGe2, URhGe, and UCoGe, where the superconducting phase is near (or coexists with) a ferromagnetic (FM) instability and spin-triplet electron pairing is driven by FM spin fluctuations. Here we use neutron scattering to show that, although UTe2 exhibits no static magnetic order down to 0.3 K, its magnetism in the [0, K, L] plane is dominated by incommensurate spin fluctuations near an antiferromagnetic ordering wave vector and extends to at least 2.6 meV. We are able to understand the dominant incommensurate spin fluctuations of UTe2 in terms of its electronic structure calculated using a combined density-functional and dynamic mean-field theory.