Half-integer quantized anomalous thermal Hall effect in the Kitaev material candidate α-RuCl3

T Yokoi; S Ma; Y Kasahara; S Kasahara; T Shibauchi; N Kurita; H Tanaka; J Nasu; Y Motome; C Hickey; S Trebst; Y Matsuda

doi:10.1126/science.aay5551

Half-integer quantized anomalous thermal Hall effect in the Kitaev material candidate α-RuCl₃

Science. 2021 Jul 30;373(6554):568-572. doi: 10.1126/science.aay5551.

Authors

T Yokoi^#¹, S Ma^#¹, Y Kasahara², S Kasahara¹, T Shibauchi³, N Kurita⁴, H Tanaka⁴, J Nasu⁵, Y Motome⁶, C Hickey⁷, S Trebst⁷, Y Matsuda²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan.
² Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan. [email protected] [email protected].
³ Department of Advanced Materials Science, University of Tokyo, Chiba 277-8561, Japan.
⁴ Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Tokyo 152-8551, Japan.
⁵ Department of Physics, Yokohama National University, Hodogaya, Yokohama 240-8501, Japan.
⁶ Department of Applied Physics, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
⁷ Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, 50937 Cologne, Germany.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 34326240
DOI: 10.1126/science.aay5551

Abstract

Half-integer thermal quantum Hall conductance has recently been reported for the two-dimensional honeycomb material α-RuCl₃ We found that the half-integer thermal Hall plateau appears even for a magnetic field with no out-of-plane components. The measured field-angular variation of the quantized thermal Hall conductance has the same sign structure as the topological Chern number of the pure Kitaev spin liquid. This observation suggests that the non-Abelian topological order associated with fractionalization of the local magnetic moments persists even in the presence of non-Kitaev interactions in α-RuCl₃.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't