V001 / JSI / T491

Slika

A team of researchers from France, India, and Slovenia was able to demonstrate the absence of a spin gap in the ground state of the iconic kagome-lattice material herbertsmithite. Their investigation entitled “Gapless ground state in the archetypal quantum kagome antiferromagnet ZnCu3(OH)6Cl2”, published in the renowned journal Nature Physics, was co-authored by Andrej Zorko from the Solid State Physics Department of the Jožef Stefan Institute and the Physics Department of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, UL. The discovery refutes a decade-old belief of a finite gap in this material and puts the enigmatic spin-liquid state in a completely new perspective. This experimental finding is consistent with recent theories suggesting a U(1) Dirac spin liquid as the ground state of the Heisenberg kagome antiferromagnet.