Work

Itinerant and topological excitations in a honeycomb spiral spin liquid candidate

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The frustrated insulating magnet can stabilize a spiral spin liquid (SSL), arising from cooperative fluctuations among a subextensively degenerate manifold of spiral configurations, with ground-state wave vectors forming a continuous contour or surface in reciprocal space. The atomic-mixing-free honeycomb antiferromagnet GdZnPO has recently emerged as a promising SSL candidate, hosting nontrivial topological excitations. Despite growing interest, the transport and topological properties of SSLs remain largely unexplored experimentally. Here, we report transport measurements on high-quality, electrically insulating GdZnPO single crystals. We observe a giant low-temperature magnetic thermal conductivity down to ∼50 mK, described by κxxm ∼ κ1T+κ0, where both κ0 and κ1 are positive constants associated with excitations along and off the spiral contour in reciprocal space, respectively. This behavior parallels the magnetic specific heat, underscoring the presence of mobile low-energy excitations intrinsic to the GdZnPO SSL. Furthermore, the observed positive magnetic thermal Hall effect confirms the topological nature of at least some of these excitations. Our findings provide key insights into the itinerant and topological properties of low-lying spin excitations in the SSL.

Source: Nature Communications

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-63620-x