Magnetoelastic effects in the hyperhoneycomb Kitaev spin liquid

Aysel Shiralieva, Artem Prokoshin, Natalia B. Perkins

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In recent years, several magnetic Mott insulators with strong spin-orbit coupling were suggested to be proxi-mate to the Kitaev quantum spin liquid, whose one of the most exciting features is the fractionalization of spin excitations into itinerant Majorana fermions and static Z2 fluxes. Unfortunately, the ground states of these sys-tems cannot be easily captured by experiment, remaining featureless to conventional local probes. Here we pro-pose to study the signatures of fractionalized excitations by exploiting their coupling to the lattice vibrations, dubbed magnetoelastic coupling, which arises from the fact that the interaction between spins depends on the relative distance between them. We argue that the magnetoelastic coupling can lead to the distinct modification of the phonon dynamics, which can be observed by measuring renormalized phonon spectrum, the sound attenu-ation and the phonon Hall viscosity. This makes the phonon dynamics a promising tool for the characterization and identification of quantum spin liquid phases. In this work, we focus on the magnetoelastic effects in the three-dimensional Kitaev model realized on the hyperhoneycomb lattice. The hyperhoneycomb Kitaev spin liquid is particularly interesting since the strong Kitaev interaction was observed in the Kitaev magnet β-Li2IrO3, for which the spin-orbit entangled Jeff = 1/2 moments of iridium ions form precisely the hyperhoneycomb lattice∗.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)851-861
Number of pages11
JournalFizika Nizkikh Temperatur
Volume47
Issue number9
StatePublished - Sep 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Kexin Feng, Rafael Fernandes, Gabor Halasz, and Mengxing Ye for helpful discussions. The work of N. B. P. was supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award No. DE-SC0018056. ________

Publisher Copyright:
© Aysel Shiralieva, Artem Prokoshin, and Natalia B. Perkins, 2021.

Keywords

  • Magnetoelastic coupling
  • Phonon dynamics
  • Quantum spin liquid

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