Abstract
This paper investigates the thermal Hall conductivity across the magnetic-field-induced transition from a gapped to a gapless quantum spin liquid for two systems: Kitaev honeycomb materials, and Heisenberg antiferromagnets on the triangular lattice.
Highlights
Quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are highly correlated systems of mutually interacting spins, in which zero-point quantum fluctuations are so strong as to prevent symmetry-breaking magnetic ordering down to the lowest temperatures [1,2,3,4]
We paid special attention to the impact of the magnetic field, taking into account that it can drive the gapped QSL phases these systems harbor into gapless QSLs with spinon Fermi surfaces, as indicated by recent numerical studies [59,60,61,62,63,64,65,97]
For the Kitaev honeycomb lattice model in a magnetic field, HK + HZ defined in Eqs. (1) and (7), our analysis captures three phases: as illustrated in Fig. 3, the non-Abelian Ising topological order (ITO) phase, which emerges when gapping out the Kitaev B phase by a small magnetic field, transitions into a gapless U(1) QSL at an intermediate value, hc1, of the magnetic field
Summary
Quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are highly correlated systems of mutually interacting spins, in which zero-point quantum fluctuations are so strong as to prevent symmetry-breaking magnetic ordering down to the lowest temperatures [1,2,3,4]. The physical importance of this simple model is paramount as sundry QSL candidates fall in the category of layered spin-1/2 triangular-lattice magnets, like the organic salts [71,72,73,74,75] and the transition metal dichalcogenides [76,77,78,79] In all these materials, which belong to the family of weak Mott insulators with strong charge fluctuations [80,81,82,83,84], transport measurements hint at the existence of extensive mobile gapless spin excitations. Our work highlights how two seemingly disparate systems—the Kitaev and Heisenberg models—exhibit parallel unquantized thermal Hall responses, and underscores the generality of the same
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