Speaker
Description
Quantum spin liquids are an exotic phase of matter characterized by the presence of fractionalized excitations(spinons) and emergent gauge fields. One of the difficulties in probing experimentally a QSL phase comes from the fact that the spinons do not carry an electric charge, ruling out the possibility of using conventional electrical probes. Going beyond conventional transport, we propose two setups of electric probes to characterize a QSL phase. First, we analyze a setup in which a QSL layer is interposed between two metallic layers. In this setup, we apply a current in the first metallic layer and measure the induced voltage on the second one. The momentum transfer is affected by the non-trivial behavior of momentum-carrying spinons and results in a response that will potentially be helpful for the future characterization of candidate QSL materials.
The second probe we propose is an STM experiment on a Kondo lattice in which the local moments have non-trivial dynamics (hence forming a QSL phase). We provide the STM response in each of the phase configurations of this system allowing also for the possibility for the conduction electrons and for the spinons to form a superconducting phase. This last setup might find a concrete realization in materials such as TaS2, TaSe2, and NbSe2 in the 1T, 2H, and in the 4Hb crystallographic phases.
