Kitaev magnetism in honeycomb RuCl 3 with intermediate spin-orbit coupling
By Heung-Sik Kim, V. Shankar, A. Catuneanu, H. Kee. 2014
204 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Intensive studies of the interplay between spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and electronic correlations in transition metal compounds have recently been undertaken. In particular, $j_{\rm eff}$ = 1/2 bands on a honeycomb lattice provide a pathway to realize Kitaev's exactly solvable spin model. However, since current wisdom requires strong atomic SOC to make $j_{\rm eff}=1/2$ bands, studies have been limited to iridium oxides. Contrary to this expectation, we demonstrate how Kitaev interactions arise in 4$d$-orbital honeycomb $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$, despite having significantly weaker SOC than the iridium oxides, via assistance from electron correlations. A strong coupling spin model for these correlation-assisted $j_{\rm eff}$ = 1/2 bands is derived, in which large antiferromagnetic Kitaev interactions emerge along with ferromagnetic Heisenberg interactions. Our analyses suggest that the ground state is a zigzag-ordered phase lying close to the antiferromagnetic Kitaev spin liquid. Experimental implications for angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy, neutron scattering, and optical conductivities are discussed.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a68bfd940f2e18a01d0f6deb6c19084579fbffdc
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In Condensed Matter Physics
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Probing and controlling magnetic states in 2D layered magnetic materials (2019, unknown): “Instead, magnetic frustration originates from anisotropic exchange interactions that result from the much stronger SOC for 4 d electrons compared with 3 d electrons 65,66 .”
- Kitaev materials (2017, result): “The emergence of zig-zag magnetic ordering in ↵-RuCl3 is also consistent with ab initio calculations [130, 128, 131, 132] and microscopic calculations for the HK model (2) [92] and variations thereof [133].”
- Crystal and Magnetic Structures in Layered, Transition Metal Dihalides and Trihalides (2017, background): “In RuCl3, spin orbit coupling, along with significant electron-electron correlations, splits the otherwise degenerate t2g states into states with effective angular momentum je f f = 3/2 and je f f = 1/2 [10,140].”