Dartmouth Events

Physics & Astronomy Virtual Quantum/Nano Seminar - Joshuah Heath, Boston College

Title: "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Kitaev Materials at the Crossroads of Theory and Experiment"

Thursday, February 25, 2021
4:00pm – 5:00pm
Zoom: Email for link and password
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars
Abstract: Kitaev magnets have gained a huge amount of interest in recent years due to the possibility of such materials hosting a highly-entangled quantum spin liquid (QSL). Such materials are characterized by a honeycomb lattice structure and can be analytically solved by mapping the localized spins into itinerant and localized Majorana excitations. Despite their potential for realizing a topologically non-trivial phase of matter, the experimental detection of the spin liquid ground state is complicated by the presence of unconventional magnetic orders deviating the system from a "true" Kitaev limit. In this talk, I will first introduce the Kitaev model and the exotic forms of magnetism which pose to "kill" the desired spin liquid phase. I will then describe how to potentially detect the QSL in a promising Kitaev spin liquid candidate, the silver lithium iridate (Ag3LiIr2O6). A bilayer Kitaev material with non-zero off-diagonal exchange, we model this system as an interacting liquid of massive, number-conserving Majorana-like polarons. By considering the effects of interaction on the statistical energy of these Majorana quasiparticles near the Majorana-Fermi surface, the resulting specific heat is found to be dominated by a quadratic-temperature dependence, in agreement with on-going experiments. 
 
For more information, contact:
Tressena Manning
603-646-2854

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.