Phonon Dynamics in the Generalized Kitaev Spin Liquid

TL;DR

This paper investigates how residual interactions in candidate Kitaev spin liquid materials affect phonon signatures, demonstrating that key features of sound attenuation persist even with these interactions, aiding experimental detection.

Contribution

It provides the first mean-field analysis of sound attenuation in the generalized $J$-$K$-$ extGamma$ model, extending previous pure Kitaev model studies to more realistic scenarios.

Findings

Sound attenuation features remain observable in the spin liquid phase despite residual interactions.

Residual interactions do not eliminate characteristic temperature and angular dependence signatures.

The study supports using ultrasound experiments to detect fractionalized excitations in real materials.

Abstract

Candidate materials for the Kitaev spin liquid generically have residual interactions beyond the Kitaev coupling. It therefore becomes necessary to understand how signatures of the quantum spin liquid, e.g., fractionalization of the spin excitations, are affected by the presence of these interactions. Recently it was shown that phonon dynamics is an indirect but effective probe to study fractionalized excitations in the Kitaev spin liquid. Ultrasound experiments can measure sound attenuation, which should show characteristic temperature and angular dependence of the sound attenuation coefficient if the scattering of phonons happens predominantly on Majorana fermions. So far the computation of the sound attenuation was only done in the pure spin-phonon coupled Kitaev model, without taking into account residual interactions. In order to understand experimental signatures, here we present a mean-field study of the sound attenuation in the generalized $J$-$K$-$\Gamma$ model, which is relevant to candidate materials. Our findings show that as long as the system is in the spin liquid phase, characteristic features of the sound attenuation remain observable even in the presence of residual interactions.