Half-integer quantized anomalous thermal Hall effect in the Kitaev material candidate α-RuCl3.

Half-integer thermal quantum Hall conductance has recently been reported for the two-dimensional honeycomb material α-RuCl3 We found that the half-integer thermal Hall plateau appears even for a magnetic field with no out-of-plane components. The measured field-angular variation of the quantized thermal Hall conductance has the same sign structure as the topological Chern number of the pure Kitaev spin liquid. This observation suggests that the non-Abelian topological order associated with fractionalization of the local magnetic moments persists even in the presence of non-Kitaev interactions in α-RuCl3.

Weyl spin liquids.

The fractionalization of quantum numbers in interacting quantum many-body systems is a central motif in condensed-matter physics with prominent examples including the fractionalization of the electron in quantum Hall liquids or the emergence of magnetic monopoles in spin-ice materials. Here, we discuss the fractionalization of magnetic moments in three-dimensional Kitaev models into Majorana fermions (and a Z_{2} gauge field) and their emergent collective behavior. We analytically demonstrate that the Majorana fermions form a Weyl superconductor for the Kitaev model on the recently synthesized hyperhoneycomb structure of ß-Li_{2}IrO_{3} when applying a magnetic field. We characterize the topologically protected bulk and surface features of this state, which we dub a Weyl spin liquid, including thermodynamic and transport signatures.

Chiral spin liquid and emergent anyons in a Kagome lattice Mott insulator.

Topological phases in frustrated quantum spin systems have fascinated researchers for decades. One of the earliest proposals for such a phase was the chiral spin liquid, a bosonic analogue of the fractional quantum Hall effect, put forward by Kalmeyer and Laughlin in 1987. Elusive for many years, recent times have finally seen this phase realized in various models, which, however, remain somewhat artificial. Here we take an important step towards the goal of finding a chiral spin liquid in nature by examining a physically motivated model for a Mott insulator on the Kagome lattice with broken time-reversal symmetry. We discuss the emergent phase from a network model perspective and present an unambiguous numerical identification and characterization of its universal topological properties, including ground-state degeneracy, edge physics and anyonic bulk excitations, by using a variety of powerful numerical probes, including the entanglement spectrum and modular transformations.

Relevance of the Heisenberg-Kitaev model for the honeycomb lattice iridates A2IrO3.

Combining thermodynamic measurements with theoretical calculations we demonstrate that the iridates A2IrO3 (A=Na, Li) are magnetically ordered Mott insulators where the magnetism of the effective spin-orbital S=1/2 moments can be captured by a Heisenberg-Kitaev (HK) model with interactions beyond nearest-neighbor exchange. Experimentally, we observe an increase of the Curie-Weiss temperature from θ≈-125 K for Na2IrO3 to θ≈-33 K for Li2IrO3, while the ordering temperature remains roughly the same T(N)≈15 K. Using functional renormalization group calculations we show that this evolution of θ and T(N) as well as the low temperature zigzag magnetic order can be captured within this extended HK model. We estimate that Na2IrO3 is deep in a magnetically ordered regime, while Li2IrO3 appears to be close to a spin-liquid regime.

Optimized folding simulations of protein A.

We describe optimized parallel tempering simulations of the 46-residue B-fragment of protein A. Native-like configurations with a root-mean-square deviation of approximately 3 A to the experimentally determined structure (Protein Data Bank identifier 1BDD) are found. However, at biologically relevant temperatures such conformations appear with only approximately 10 % frequency in our simulations. Possible shortcomings in our energy function are discussed.

Performance limitations of flat-histogram methods.

We determine the optimal scaling of local-update flat-histogram methods with system size by using a perfect flat-histogram scheme based upon the exact density of states of 2D Ising models. The typical tunneling time needed to sample the entire bandwidth does not scale with the number of spins N as the minimal N2 of an unbiased random walk in energy space. While the scaling is power law for the ferromagnetic and fully frustrated Ising model, for the +/-J nearest-neighbor spin glass the distribution of tunneling times is governed by a fat-tailed Fréchet extremal value distribution that obeys exponential scaling. Furthermore, the shape parameters of these distributions indicate that statistical sample means become ill defined already for moderate system sizes within these complex energy landscapes.

Strong-coupling expansions for multiparticle excitations: continuum and bound states

We present a new linked cluster expansion for calculating properties of multiparticle excitation spectra to high orders. We use it to obtain the two-particle spectra for systems of coupled spin-half dimers. We find that even for weakly coupled dimers the spectrum is very rich, consisting of many bound states. The number of bound states depends on both geometry of coupling and frustration. Many of the bound states can only be seen by going to sufficiently high orders in the perturbation theory, showing the extended character of the pair attraction.