Quantized and unquantized thermal Hall conductance of Kitaev spin-liquid candidate $α$-RuCl$_3$

Despite extensive investigations, a topological state that hosts Majorana edge modes in the magnetic field-induced quantum disordered state of the Kitaev candidate material $α$-RuCl$_3$ has been hotly debated. To gain more insight into this issue, we measured the thermal Hall conductivity $κ_{xy}$ of various samples grown by the Bridgman method. The results show that the half-integer quantum thermal Hall effect is intimately related to the magnitude of longitudinal thermal conductivity and the Néel temperature at zero field, both of which are sample dependent. Samples exhibiting the half-integer quantum thermal Hall effect have larger zero-field thermal conductivity values than a threshold value, implying that a long mean free path of heat carriers is an important prerequisite. In addition, we find that samples with a higher Néel temperature exhibit a higher magnetic field at which quantization starts to occur. These results indicate that the quantization phenomenon is significantly affected by the impurity scatterings and the non-Kitaev interactions.

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