Abstract
The so-called “Kitaev candidate” materials based on and metals have recently emerged as magnetic systems displaying strongly anisotropic exchange interactions reminiscent of the Kitaev’s honeycomb model. Recently, these materials have been shown to commonly display a distinct sawtooth angular dependence of the magnetic torque over a wide range of magnetic fields. While higher order chiral spin interactions have been considered as a source of this observation, we show here that bilinear anisotropic interactions and/or anisotropy are each sufficient to explain the observed torque response, which may be distinguished on the basis of high-field measurements. These findings unify the understanding of magnetic torque experiments in a variety of Kitaev candidate materials.
- Received 28 September 2018
- Revised 21 January 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.197202
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