Spin-orbit coupling induced semi-metallic state in the 1/3 hole doped hyper-kagome Na3Ir3O8

Abstract

The complex iridium oxide Na3Ir3O8 with a B-site ordered spinel structure was synthesized in single crystalline form, where the chiral hyper-kagome lattice of Ir atoms, as observed in the spin-liquid candidate Na4Ir3O8, was identified. The average valence of Ir is 4.33+ and, therefore, Na3Ir3O8 can be viewed as a doped analogue of the hyper-kagome spin liquid with Ir4+. The transport measurements showed that Na3Ir3O8 is in fact a semi-metal. The electronic structure calculation demonstrated that the strong spin-orbit coupling of Ir yields the semi-metallic state out of an otherwise band insulating state, which may harbor exotic topological effects embedded in the hyper-kagome lattice.

Reference updated

References in corpus (4)

• Mott Insulators in the Strong Spin-Orbit Coupling Limit: From Heisenberg to a Quantum Compass and Kitaev Models
• Novel Jeff = 1/2 Mott State Induced by Relativistic Spin-Orbit Coupling in Sr2IrO4
• Mott Transition from a Spin Liquid to a Fermi Liquid in the Spin-Frustrated Organic Conductor kappa-(ET)2Cu2(CN)3
• Electronic excitations in the edge-shared relativistic Mott insulator: Na${}_2$IrO${}_3$