Mott insulators in the strong spin-orbit coupling limit: from Heisenberg to a quantum compass and Kitaev models.

By G. Jackeli, G. Khaliullin. Physical Review Letters, 2008

1,495 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the magnetic interactions in Mott-Hubbard systems with partially filled t_{2g} levels and with strong spin-orbit coupling. The latter entangles the spin and orbital spaces, and leads to a rich variety of the low energy Hamiltonians that extrapolate from the Heisenberg to a quantum compass model depending on the lattice geometry. This gives way to "engineer" in such Mott insulators an exactly solvable spin model by Kitaev relevant for quantum computation. We, finally, explain "weak" ferromagnetism, with an anomalously large ferromagnetic moment, in Sr2IrO4.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8df21f6b54ac5aa28240e7f704cf595e8dcad4aa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Simon Trebst
2. C. Hickey
3. Yi Zhou
4. T. Ng
5. J. Knolle
6. A. Nahum
7. Roderich Moessner
8. J. Chalker

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Yi Zhou
2. T. Ng
3. S. Nagler
4. Roderich Moessner
5. Simon Trebst
6. J. Knolle
7. C. Hickey
8. M. Hermanns

Citations in the corpus

• Kitaev materials (2017, background): “As in the case of edge-sharing IrO6 octahedra, this leads to a destructive interference and subsequent suppression of the isotropic Heisenberg exchange [7, 9, 26].”
• Dynamics of a Two-Dimensional Quantum Spin Liquid: Signatures of Emergent Majorana Fermions and Fluxes (2013, background): “1), by virtue of which it is a promising candidate for realisation in materials phy sics [10], or in cold atom implementations of quantum simulators [11].”
• Quantum spin liquids (2019, background): “The proposal by Jackeli and Khaliullin (67) that certain Mott-Hubbard systems with partially filled t2 g-levels and strong spin-orbit coupling might realize the Kitaev model led to an intense search.”