Quantized and unquantized thermal Hall conductance of Kitaev spin-liquid candidate $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$

Abstract

Despite extensive investigations, a topological state that hosts Majorana edge modes in the magnetic field-induced quantum disordered state of the Kitaev candidate material $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$ has been hotly debated. To gain more insight into this issue, we measured the thermal Hall conductivity $\kappa_{xy}$ of various samples grown by the Bridgman method. The results show that the half-integer quantum thermal Hall effect is intimately related to the magnitude of longitudinal thermal conductivity and the N\'{e}el temperature at zero field, both of which are sample dependent. Samples exhibiting the half-integer quantum thermal Hall effect have larger zero-field thermal conductivity values than a threshold value, implying that a long mean free path of heat carriers is an important prerequisite. In addition, we find that samples with a higher N\'{e}el temperature exhibit a higher magnetic field at which quantization starts to occur. These results indicate that the quantization phenomenon is significantly affected by the impurity scatterings and the non-Kitaev interactions.