Neutron tomography of magnetic Majorana fermions in a proximate quantum spin liquid

Understand

Quantum matter provides an effective vacuum out of which arise emergent particles not corresponding to any experimentally detected elementary particle.

• Topological quantum materials in particular have become a focus of intense research in part because of the remarkable possibility to realize Majorana fermions, with their potential for new, decoherence-free quantum computing architectures.
• In this paper we undertake a study on high-quality single crystal of $\alpha-RuCl_3$ which has been identified as a material realizing a proximate Kitaev state, a topological quantum state with magnetic Majorana fermions.
• Four-dimensional tomographic reconstruction of dynamical correlations measured using neutrons is uniquely powerful for probing such magnetic states.