Research: Bond-disordered spin liquid and the honeycomb iridate H3LiIr2O6

Much effort has been devoted to identifying candidate quantum spin liquid materials. The role of disorder in these -- is it an innocent bystander or an active player, for better or worse -- is generally hard to address. This work argues that in the recently studied compound H₃LiIr₂O₆, several of the anomalous features are naturally accounted for in a model where disorder plays a crucial role.

J. Knolle, R. Moessner, N. B. Perkins,
Bond-disordered spin liquid and the honeycomb iridate H₃LiIr₂O₆: abundant low-energy density of states from random Majorana hopping,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 047202 (2019) (arXiv)