What carries the thermal Hall signal in $\alpha$-RuCl3?
In plain words
Heat flowing through $\alpha$-RuCl3 in a magnetic field is deflected sideways, an effect called the thermal Hall effect. It is unclear whether the sideways heat is carried by Majorana fermions of a spin liquid, by magnons (spin waves) or by phonons (lattice vibrations).
Precise statement
In alpha-RuCl3 with field H of 60 to 120 kOe in the honeycomb plane and T of 2 to 20 K, identify the carriers responsible for $\kappa_{xy}(T,H)$: chiral Majorana edge modes, topological magnons, or phonons with field-induced Berry curvature or Hall viscosity. An answer is a microscopic model that reproduces $\kappa_{xy}(T,H)$ and its dependence on field angle, sample quality and $\kappa_{xx}$ across published samples.
What would settle it
Measurements of $\kappa_{xy}$ on many samples with characterized stacking, combined with phonon and magnon calculations from the measured spin Hamiltonian, that isolate one dominant channel.
Status in the literature
Unverified note: it names recent work and was partly written without a live literature search; it awaits a check by an editor.
Phonon (Lefrancois et al., PRX 2022) and magnon (Czajka et al., Nature Materials 2023) explanations compete with the Majorana interpretation; Shragai et al. (Nature 2026) measured a phonon Hall viscosity that accounts for a substantial fraction of $\kappa_{xy}$.
Problems built on this one
Special cases
Results
No results have been posted on this problem yet.
Post a result · how results are checked
Sign in to follow or save this problem
Comments (0)
Comments are not records: they are not signed, stamped or logged. How comments work
No comments yet.
Sign in to comment.