Kavli Affiliate: Joel E. Moore
| First 5 Authors: Sijie Xu, Rabindranath Bag, Nicholas E. Sherman, Lalit Yadav, Alexander I. Kolesnikov
| Summary:
The emergence of a quantum spin liquid (QSL), a state of matter that can
result when electron spins are highly correlated but do not become ordered, has
been the subject of a considerable body of research in condensed matter
physics. Spin liquid states have been proposed as hosts for high-temperature
superconductivity and can host topological properties with potential
applications in quantum information science. The excitations of most quantum
spin liquids are not conventional spin waves but rather quasiparticles known as
spinons, whose existence is well established experimentally only in
one-dimensional systems; the unambiguous experimental realization of QSL
behavior in higher dimensions remains challenging. Here we investigate the
novel compound YbZn2GaO5, which hosts an ideal triangular lattice of effective
spin-1/2 moments with no inherent chemical disorder. Thermodynamic and
inelastic neutron scattering (INS) measurements performed on high-quality
single crystal samples of YbZn2GaO5 exclude the possibility of long-range
magnetic ordering down to 60 mK, demonstrate a quadratic power law for the heat
capacity and reveal a continuum of magnetic excitations in parts of the
Brillouin zone. Both low-temperature thermodynamics and INS spectra suggest
that YbZn2GaO5 is a U(1) Dirac QSL with gapless spinon excitations concentrated
at certain points in the Brillouin zone, and additional features in INS are
also consistent with theoretical expectations for a Dirac QSL on the triangular
lattice.
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