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Title: Is H3LiIr2O6 a bond-disordered Kitaev spin liquid?
Plain: H3LiIr2O6 is a honeycomb iridium oxide that shows no magnetic order down to the lowest temperatures measured. The hydrogen atoms between its layers are disordered, and it is unclear whether its state is a Kitaev spin liquid altered by random couplings or a collection of random spin pairs unrelated to Kitaev physics.
Precise: In H3LiIr2O6 (no magnetic order detected down to tens of mK, $C/T$ diverging at low $T$ with $H/T$ scaling), determine whether the low-energy density of states and the scaling of $C/T$ arise from random Majorana hopping and fluxes bound to vacancies in a Kitaev spin liquid (Knolle, Moessner, Perkins, PRL 2019), or from random singlets of local moments without Kitaev fractionalization. An answer identifies the ground state with measured and calculated low-energy density of states agreeing within errors.
Settled by: Thermal conductivity, NMR and neutron spectroscopy on samples with controlled hydrogen or deuterium stacking disorder, compared with Kitaev-model simulations that include the measured bond disorder.
Kind: phenomenon
Answer type: classification
References: (empty)
Literature status: contested
Status note: Kitagawa et al. (Nature 2018) reported the absence of order; Knolle et al. (PRL 2019) and Kimchi et al. (Nature Communications 2018) gave competing disorder-based explanations of the low-energy states.
Posed since: 2018