Magnon thermal Hall effect in the candidate Kitaev spin-liquid α-RuCl<sub>3</sub>

ORAL

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments measuring the thermal Hall conductivity of α-RuCl3 and using spin-wave theory and model effective Hamiltonians from the literature, the magnon Thermal Hall coefficient in the magnetically ordered phase is computed. Comparing directly with the experiment, no previously proposed model well matches the data. A model is determined which can explain the data demonstrating that the magnon Berry curvature could be responsible. The discrepancy could also be explained by phonons but not by Kitaev-like excitations.

*We acknowledge support from the Quantum Materials Program at LBNL, funded by the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

–

Presenters

  • Jonathan Cookmeyer

    • Physics, University of California, Berkeley

Authors

  • Jonathan Cookmeyer

    • Physics, University of California, Berkeley

  • Joel Moore

    • University of California, Berkeley
    • Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
    • University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • Physics, University of California, Berkeley
    • University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory