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Mardi 2 juillet à 14h, Amphi Holweck. escalier C 1er etage
Transport of quantum excitations : magnons, spinons, and Majorana fermions
Transport properties provide important access to a solid’s quasiparticles, such as quasiparticle density, mobility, and scattering. The transport of heat can be particularly revealing because, in principle, all types of excitations in a solid may contribute. Heat transport is well understood for phonons and electrons, but relatively little is known about heat transported by magnetic excitations. However, during the last about two decades, the magnetic heat transport attracted increasing attention after the discovery of large and unusual signatures of it in low-dimensional quantum magnetic cuprate materials. Today it constitutes an important probe to otherwise often elusive, topological quasiparticles in a broader class of quantum magnets. In the first part of this talk, I will show that there is a fundamental difference in the transport properties of the rather conventional magnon excitations and fractionalized spinon excitations of prototypical 2D respectively 1D antiferromagnetic Heisenberg systems. In the second part, I will address recent experimental findings for the thermal transport of alpha-RuCl3, which is considered a candidate material for a topological Kitaev quantum spin liquid for which gauge fluxes and Majorana fermions have been theoretically predicted as fractionalized exciations.
