Thermal Hall effect in the Kitaev-Heisenberg system with spin-phonon coupling

Shaozhi Li, Satoshi Okamoto

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10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Motivated by the giant phonon anomalies in a-RuCl3 reported by H. Li et al. [Nat. Commun. 12, 3513 (2021)10.1038/s41467-021-23826-1], we investigate the thermal Hall effect in a Kitaev-Heisenberg system in the presence of the coupling between spins and phonons arising from chlorine atoms' vibration. We observe that the coupling modifies the relative stability between different magnetic states under a magnetic field, especially stabilizing a canted zigzag antiferromagnetic state. Remarkably, the spin-phonon interaction has distinct effects on the thermal Hall conductivity in different magnetically ordered states. For a canted zigzag state, which is relevant to a-RuCl3, the spin-phonon interaction enhances the magnon excitation gap induced by a magnetic field and suppresses the thermal Hall conductivity at low temperatures. For the Kitaev spin liquid state, we find that the spin-phonon interaction reduces the excitation gap of Majorana fermions and destabilizes the quantized thermal Hall effect. Our results demonstrate a crucial role of phonon degrees of freedom in the thermal Hall effect in Kitaev materials.

Original languageEnglish
Article number024413
JournalPhysical Review B
Volume106
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 1 2022

Funding

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Science Center. This research used resources of the Compute and Data Environment for Science (CADES) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. The U.S. Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains, a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.

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