Journal article
Anisotropic magnetic interactions in a candidate Kitaev spin liquid close to a metal-insulator transition
- Abstract:
- In the Kitaev honeycomb model, spins coupled by strongly-frustrated anisotropic interactions do not order at low temperature but instead form a quantum spin liquid with spin fractionalisation into Majorana fermions and static fluxes. The realization of such a model in crystalline materials could lead to major breakthroughs in understanding entangled quantum states, however achieving this in practice is a very challenging task. The recently synthesized honeycomb material RuI3 shows no long-range magnetic order down to the lowest probed temperatures and has been theoretically proposed as a quantum spin liquid candidate material on the verge of an insulator to metal transition. Here we report a comprehensive study of the magnetic anisotropy in un-twinned single crystals via torque magnetometry and detect clear signatures of strongly anisotropic and frustrated magnetic interactions. We attribute the development of sawtooth and six-fold torque signal to strongly anisotropic, bond-dependent magnetic interactions by comparing to theoretical calculations. As a function of magnetic field strength at low temperatures, torque shows an unusual non-parabolic dependence suggestive of a proximity to a field-induced transition. Thus, RuI3, without signatures of long-range magnetic order, displays key hallmarks of an exciting candidate for extended Kitaev magnetism with enhanced quantum fluctuations.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Supplementary materials, pdf, 13.1MB, Terms of use)
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.0MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s42005-024-01873-6
Authors
+ Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/0439y7842
- Grant:
- EP/I004475/1
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Communications Physics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 390
- Publication date:
- 2024-11-29
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-11-14
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2399-3650
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
-
2067697
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2067697
- Source identifiers:
-
2460374
- Deposit date:
-
2024-11-29
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Ma et al
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproductionin anymediumorformat,aslong as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commonslicenceandyourintendeduseisnotpermitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtainpermissiondirectly fromthecopyrightholder.Toviewacopyofthis licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record