Cascade of correlated electron states in the kagome superconductor CsV3Sb5.

The kagome lattice of transition metal atoms provides an exciting platform to study electronic correlations in the presence of geometric frustration and nontrivial band topology1-18, which continues to bear surprises. Here, using spectroscopic imaging scanning tunnelling microscopy, we discover a temperature-dependent cascade of different symmetry-broken electronic states in a new kagome superconductor, CsV3Sb5. We reveal, at a temperature far above the superconducting transition temperature Tc ~ 2.5 K, a tri-directional charge order with a 2a0 period that breaks the translation symmetry of the lattice. As the system is cooled down towards Tc, we observe a prominent V-shaped spectral gap opening at the Fermi level and an additional breaking of the six-fold rotational symmetry, which persists through the superconducting transition. This rotational symmetry breaking is observed as the emergence of an additional 4a0 unidirectional charge order and strongly anisotropic scattering in differential conductance maps. The latter can be directly attributed to the orbital-selective renormalization of the vanadium kagome bands. Our experiments reveal a complex landscape of electronic states that can coexist on a kagome lattice, and highlight intriguing parallels to high-Tc superconductors and twisted bilayer graphene.

Quantization of the Thermal Hall Conductivity at Small Hall Angles.

We consider the effect of coupling between phonons and a chiral Majorana edge in a gapped chiral spin liquid with Ising anyons (e.g., Kitaev's non-Abelian spin liquid on the honeycomb lattice). This is especially important in the regime in which the longitudinal bulk heat conductivity κ_{xx} due to phonons is much larger than the expected quantized thermal Hall conductance κ_{xy}^{q}=(πT/12)(k_{B}^{2}/ℏ) of the ideal isolated edge mode, so that the thermal Hall angle, i.e., the angle between the thermal current and the temperature gradient, is small. By modeling the interaction between a Majorana edge and bulk phonons, we show that the exchange of energy between the two subsystems leads to a transverse component of the bulk current and thereby an effective Hall conductivity. Remarkably, the latter is equal to the quantized value when the edge and bulk can thermalize, which occurs for a Hall bar of length L≫ℓ, where ℓ is a thermalization length. We obtain ℓ∼T^{-5} for a model of the Majorana-phonon coupling. We also find that the quality of the quantization depends on the means of measuring the temperature and, surprisingly, a more robust quantization is obtained when the lattice, not the spin, temperature is measured. We present general hydrodynamic equations for the system, detailed results for the temperature and current profiles, and an estimate for the coupling strength and its temperature dependence based on a microscopic model Hamiltonian. Our results may explain recent experiments observing a quantized thermal Hall conductivity in the regime of small Hall angle, κ_{xy}/κ_{xx}∼10^{-3}, in α-RuCl_{3}.