Pseudoscalar U(1) spin liquids in α-RuCl3

Abstract

A recent experiment has reported oscillations of the thermal conductivity of α-RuCl3 driven by an in-plane magnetic field that are reminiscent of the quantum oscillations in metals. At first glance, these observations are consistent with the presence of the long-sought-after spinon Fermi surface state. Strikingly, however, the experiment also reported vanishing thermal Hall conductivity coexisting with the oscillations of the longitudinal one. Such absence of the thermal Hall effect must originate from crystalline symmetries of α-RuCl3. But if the system was a traditional spinon Fermi surface state, these symmetries would also necessarily prohibit the emergence of a magnetic field acting on the spinons, in stark contradiction with the presence of quantum oscillations in experiments. To reconcile these observations, we introduce a new class of symmetry enriched "pseudoscalar"U(1) spin liquids in which certain crystalline symmetries act as a particle-hole conjugation on the spinons. The associated pseudoscalar spinon Fermi surface states allow for the coexistence of an emergent Landau quantizing magnetic field while having an exactly zero thermal Hall conductivity. We develop a general theory of these states by constructing Gutzwiller-projected wave functions and describing how they naturally appear as U(1) spin liquids with a distinctive projective symmetry group implementation of crystalline symmetries in the fermionic parton representation of spins. We propose that the field induced quantum disordered state in α-RuCl3 descends from a pseudoscalar spinon Fermi surface state that features compensated spinon-particle and spinon-hole pockets possibly located around the M points of its honeycomb Brillouin zone. These points are connected via a wave vector associated with the emergence of the competing zig-zag antiferromagnetic state.