TY - JOUR
T1 - Planar thermal Hall effect from phonons in a Kitaev candidate material
AU - Chen, Lu
AU - Lefrançois, Étienne
AU - Vallipuram, Ashvini
AU - Barthélemy, Quentin
AU - Ataei, Amirreza
AU - Yao, Weiliang
AU - Li, Yuan
AU - Taillefer, Louis
N1 - L.T. acknowledges support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) as a Fellow and funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; PIN: 123817), the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologies (FRQNT), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and a Canada Research Chair. This research was undertaken thanks in part to funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. The work at Peking University was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2021YFA1401901) and the NSF of China (Grant No. 12061131004).
PY - 2024/12
Y1 - 2024/12
N2 - The thermal Hall effect has emerged as a potential probe of exotic excitations in spin liquids. In the Kitaev magnet α-RuCl3, the thermal Hall conductivity κxy has been attributed to Majorana fermions, chiral magnons, or phonons. Theoretically, the former two types of heat carriers can generate a “planar” κxy, whereby the magnetic field is parallel to the heat current, but it is unknown whether phonons also could. Here we show that a planar κxy is present in another Kitaev candidate material, Na2Co2TeO6. Based on the striking similarity between κxy and the phonon-dominated thermal conductivity κxx, we attribute the effect to phonons. We observe a large difference in κxy between different configurations of heat current and magnetic field, which reveals that the direction of heat current matters in determining the planar κxy. Our observation calls for a re-evaluation of the planar κxy observed inα-RuCl3.
AB - The thermal Hall effect has emerged as a potential probe of exotic excitations in spin liquids. In the Kitaev magnet α-RuCl3, the thermal Hall conductivity κxy has been attributed to Majorana fermions, chiral magnons, or phonons. Theoretically, the former two types of heat carriers can generate a “planar” κxy, whereby the magnetic field is parallel to the heat current, but it is unknown whether phonons also could. Here we show that a planar κxy is present in another Kitaev candidate material, Na2Co2TeO6. Based on the striking similarity between κxy and the phonon-dominated thermal conductivity κxx, we attribute the effect to phonons. We observe a large difference in κxy between different configurations of heat current and magnetic field, which reveals that the direction of heat current matters in determining the planar κxy. Our observation calls for a re-evaluation of the planar κxy observed inα-RuCl3.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85191300373
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85191300373#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-024-47858-5
DO - 10.1038/s41467-024-47858-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 38664403
AN - SCOPUS:85191300373
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 15
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 3513
ER -