Spin excitation continuum to topological magnon crossover and thermal Hall conductivity in Kitaev magnets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been great interest in identifying a Kitaev quantum spin liquid state in frustrated magnets with bond-dependent interactions. In particular, the experimental report of a half-quantized thermal Hall conductivity in $\ensuremath{\alpha}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{\mathrm{RuCl}}_{3}$ in the presence of a magnetic field has generated excitement as it could be strong evidence for a field-induced chiral spin liquid. More recent experiments, however, provide a conflicting interpretation advocating for topological magnons in the field-polarized state as the origin of the nonquantized thermal Hall conductivity observed in their experiments. An inherent difficulty in distinguishing between the two scenarios is that the phase transition between a putative two-dimensional spin liquid and the field-polarized state exists only at zero temperature, while the behavior at finite temperature is mostly crossover phenomena. In this work, we provide insights into the finite-temperature crossover behavior between the spin excitation continuum in a quantum spin liquid and topological magnons in the field-polarized state in three different theoretical models with large Kitaev interactions. These models allow for a field-induced phase transition from a spin liquid (or an intermediate field-induced spin liquid) to the field-polarized state in the quantum model. We obtain the dynamical spin structure factor as a function of magnetic field using molecular dynamics simulations and compute thermal Hall conductivity in the field-polarized regime. We demonstrate the gradual evolution of the dynamical spin structure factor exhibiting crossover behavior near magnetic fields where zero-temperature phase transitions occur in the quantum model. We also examine nonlinear effects on topological magnons and the validity of thermal Hall conductivity computed using linear spin wave theory. We discuss the implications of our results for existing and future experiments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".