Challenges in design of Kitaev materials: Magnetic interactions from competing energy scales

By S. Winter, Ying Li, H. Jeschke, R. Valentí. 2016

365 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Much interest has emerged in the realization of materials with quantum spin liquid ground states, which would provide fertile ground for realizing exotic excitations. Three ``Kitaev'' spin liquid candidate materials have been proposed -- Na${}_{2}$IrO${}_{3}$, $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-RuCl${}_{3}$, and $\ensuremath{\alpha}$-Li${}_{2}$IrO${}_{3}$ -- and there has been many diverging proposals for the most relevant interactions. Here, the authors re-evaluate carefully the magnetic interactions in these materials, using nonperturbative exact diagonalization methods. The results clarify misconceptions in the literature and help estimate the potential for realizing the spin liquid state in real materials.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c770319046898ea1fc651cfcb7c7746c3024530c

How researchers see this paper

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In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Simon Trebst
2. C. Hickey
3. J. Knolle
4. M. Hermanns
5. I. Kimchi

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Simon Trebst
2. J. Knolle
3. C. Hickey
4. M. Hermanns
5. I. Kimchi

Citations in the corpus

• Kitaev materials (2017, background): “Several ideas have been put forward to bring Na2IrO3 closer to the Kitaev spin liquid regime, such as the making of thin films [98] or heterostructures [99], but probably the most practical scheme has been to replace the Na atoms by the smaller Li atoms and instead explore the physics of Li2IrO3.”
• Physics of the Kitaev Model: Fractionalization, Dynamic Correlations, and Material Connections (2017, background): “The latter may be more advantageous for large Kitaev interactions [78].”