Nandini Trivedi and postdoc published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences
Professor Nandini Trivedi and her postdoc Niravkumar D. Patel have recently published "Magnetic field-induced intermediate quantum spin liquid with spinon Fermi surface" in the June 18, 2019 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Quantum spin liquids are a novel state of matter that provide a platform for robust quantum computing.
In a quantum spin liquid, the spins remain disordered down to zero temperature, and yet the spins are entangled over a long range. The Kitaev model with anisotropic Ising interactions on the bonds of a honeycomb lattice is a paradigmatic model for a quantum spin liquid. We explore the effects of a magnetic field and discover an intermediate gapless spin liquid sandwiched between the known gapped Kitaev spin liquid and a polarized phase. We show that the gapless spin liquid harbors fractionalized neutral fermionic excitations, dubbed spinons, that remarkably form a Fermi surface in a charge insulator.
