Magnetic Raman continuum in single crystalline H$_3$LiIr$_2$O$_6$

Shenghai Pei; Liang-Long Huang; Gaomin Li; Xiaobin Chen; Bin Xi; XinWei Wang; Youguo Shi; Dapeng Yu; Cai Liu; Le Wang; Fei Ye; Mingyuan Huang; Jia-Wei Mei

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.101.201101

paper

Magnetic Raman continuum in single crystalline H $_{3}$ LiIr $_{2}$ O $_{6}$

arXiv:1906.03601 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.101.201101

Abstract

Recently H $_{3}$ LiIr $_{2}$ O $_{6}$ has been reported as a spin-orbital entangled quantum spin liquid (QSL) [K. Kitagawa et al., Nature {\bf 554}, 341 (2018)], albeit its connection to Kitaev QSL has not been yet identified. To unveil the related Kitaev physics, we perform the first Raman spectroscopy studies on single crystalline H $_{3}$ LiIr $_{2}$ O $_{6}$ samples. We implement a soft chemical replacement of Li $^{+}$ with H $^{+}$ from $α$ -Li $_{2}$ IrO $_{3}$ single crystals to synthesize the single crystal samples of the iridate second generation H $_{3}$ LiIr $_{2}$ O $_{6}$ . The Raman spectroscopy can be used to diagnose the QSL state since the magnetic Raman continuum arises from a process involving pairs of fractionalized Majorana fermionic excitation in a pure Kitaev model. We observe a broad dome-shaped magnetic continuum in H $_{3}$ LiIr $_{2}$ O $_{6}$ , in line with theoretical expectations for the two-spin process in the Kitaev QSL. Our results establish the close connection to the Kitaev QSL physics in H $_{3}$ LiIr $_{2}$ O $_{6}$ .

Magnetic Raman continuum in single crystalline H3​LiIr2​O6​

Abstract

Magnetic Raman continuum in single crystalline H $_{3}$ LiIr $_{2}$ O $_{6}$