Recently H3LiIr2O6 has been reported as a spin-orbital entangled quantum spin liquid (QSL) [K. Kitagawa et al., Nature {\bf 554}, 341 (2018)], albeit its connection to Kitaev QSL has not been yet identified. To unveil the related Kitaev physics, we perform the first Raman spectroscopy studies on single crystalline H3LiIr2O6 samples. We implement a soft chemical replacement of Li+ with H+ from α-Li2IrO3 single crystals to synthesize the single crystal samples of the iridate second generation H3LiIr2O6. The Raman spectroscopy can be used to diagnose the QSL state since the magnetic Raman continuum arises from a process involving pairs of fractionalized Majorana fermionic excitation in a pure Kitaev model. We observe a broad dome-shaped magnetic continuum in H3LiIr2O6, in line with theoretical expectations for the two-spin process in the Kitaev QSL. Our results establish the close connection to the Kitaev QSL physics in H3LiIr2O6.
@article{arxiv.1906.03601,
title = {Magnetic Raman continuum in single crystalline H$_3$LiIr$_2$O$_6$},
author = {Shenghai Pei and Liang-Long Huang and Gaomin Li and Xiaobin Chen and Bin Xi and XinWei Wang and Youguo Shi and Dapeng Yu and Cai Liu and Le Wang and Fei Ye and Mingyuan Huang and Jia-Wei Mei},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.03601},
year = {2020}
}