Incommensurate counterrotating magnetic order stabilized by Kitaev interactions in the layered honeycomb α − Li 2 IrO 3
By S. Williams, R. Johnson, F. Freund, Sungkyun Choi, A. Jesche, I. Kimchi, S. Manni, A. Bombardi, P. Manuel, Philipp Gegenwart and 1 more. 2016
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The layered honeycomb magnet $\ensuremath{\alpha}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{\mathrm{Li}}_{2}{\mathrm{IrO}}_{3}$ has been theoretically proposed as a candidate to display unconventional magnetic behaviour associated with Kitaev interactions between spin-orbit entangled ${j}_{\mathrm{eff}}=1/2$ magnetic moments on a honeycomb lattice. Here we report single crystal magnetic resonant x-ray diffraction combined with powder magnetic neutron diffraction to reveal an incommensurate magnetic order in the honeycomb layers with Ir magnetic moments counterrotating on nearest-neighbor sites. This unexpected type of magnetic structure for a honeycomb magnet cannot be explained by a spin Hamiltonian with dominant isotropic (Heisenberg) couplings. The magnetic structure shares many key features with the magnetic order in the structural polytypes $\ensuremath{\beta}$- and $\ensuremath{\gamma}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{\mathrm{Li}}_{2}{\mathrm{IrO}}_{3}$, understood theoretically to be stabilized by dominant Kitaev interactions between Ir moments located on the vertices of three-dimensional hyperhoneycomb and stripyhoneycomb lattices, respectively. Based on this analogy and a theoretical soft-spin analysis of magnetic ground states for candidate spin Hamiltonians, we propose that Kitaev interactions also dominate in $\ensuremath{\alpha}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{\mathrm{Li}}_{2}{\mathrm{IrO}}_{3}$, indicative of universal Kitaev physics across all three members of the harmonic honeycomb family of ${\mathrm{Li}}_{2}{\mathrm{IrO}}_{3}$ polytypes.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74ab525b8bf81393faddb81d886f715d72b7fd4b
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In Condensed Matter Physics
In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
Citations in the corpus
- Physics of the Kitaev Model: Fractionalization, Dynamic Correlations, and Material Connections (2017, background): “The three structural polytypes α, β, γ-Li2IrO3 all show [23, 24, 26] an extremely unusual magnetic order which appears to be a unique signature of the Kitaev exchange.”
- Kitaev materials (2017, methodology): “On the way, the unconventional magnetism of spin-orbit entangled j = 1/2 moments in the Li2IrO3 polymorphs has been elucidated as a rare example of counter-rotating spin spirals [104].”