Motivated by recent experimental observations in α-RuCl_{3}, we study the K-Γ model on the honeycomb lattice in an external magnetic field. By a slave-particle representation and variational ...Monte Carlo calculations, we reproduce the phase transition from zigzag magnetic order to a field-induced disordered phase. The nature of this state depends crucially on the field orientation. For particular field directions in the honeycomb plane, we find a gapless Dirac spin liquid, in agreement with recent experiments on α-RuCl_{3}. For a range of out-of-plane fields, we predict the existence of a Kalmeyer-Laughlin-type chiral spin liquid, which would show an integer-quantized thermal Hall effect.
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐Cov‐2), the pathogen of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID‐19), has posed a serious threat to global public health. The WHO has declared ...the outbreak of SARS‐CoV‐2 infection an international public health emergency. Lung lesions have been considered as the major damage caused by SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. However, liver injury has also been reported to occur during the course of the disease in severe cases. Similarly, previous studies have shown that liver damage was common in the patients infected by the other two highly pathogenic coronavirus – severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS‐CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS‐CoV), and associated with the severity of diseases. In this review, the characteristics and mechanism of liver injury caused by SARS‐CoV, MERS‐CoV as well as SARS‐CoV‐2 infection were summarized, which may provide help for further studies on the liver injury of COVID‐19.
Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases are bulk-gapped quantum phases with symmetries, which have gapless or degenerate boundary states as long as the symmetries are not broken. The SPT phases ...in free fermion systems, such as topological insulators, can be classified; however, it is not known what SPT phases exist in general interacting systems. We present a systematic way to construct SPT phases in interacting bosonic systems. Just as group theory allows us to construct 230 crystal structures in three-dimensional space, we use group cohomology theory to systematically construct different interacting bosonic SPT phases in any dimension and with any symmetry, leading to the discovery of bosonic topological insulators and superconductors.
The design on synthesizing a sturdy, low‐cost, clean, and sustainable electrocatalyst, as well as achieving high performance with low overpotential and good durability toward water splitting, is ...fairly vital in environmental and energy‐related subject. Herein, for the first time the growth of sulfur (S) defect engineered self‐supporting array electrode composed of metallic Re and ReS2 nanosheets on carbon cloth (referred as Re/ReS2/CC) via a facile hydrothermal method and the following thermal treatment with H2/N2 flow is reported. It is expected that, for example, the as‐prepared Re/ReS2‐7H/CC for the electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) under acidic medium affords a quite low overpotential of 42 mV to achieve a current density of 10 mA cm−2 and a very small Tafel slope of 36 mV decade−1, which are comparable to some of the promising HER catalysts. Furthermore, in the two‐electrode system, a small cell voltage of 1.30 V is recorded under alkaline condition. Characterizations and density functional theory results expound that the introduced S defects in Re/ReS2‐7H/CC can offer abundant active sites to advantageously capture electron, enhance the electron transport capacity, and weaken the adsorption free energy of H* at the active sites, being responsible for its superior electrocatalytic performance.
The S‐defect‐rich ReS2/CC electrocatalyst for highly efficient hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is constructed. The as‐prepared Re/ReS2‐7H/CC affords the overpotentials of 44 and 290 mV at 10 mA cm−2 under alkaline condition for HER and OER, respectively, a small cell voltage of 1.30 V in alkaline medium in the two‐electrode system, which are superior to pristine ReS2/CC.
The cobalt‐catalyzed alkoxylation of C(sp2)H bonds in aromatic and olefinic carboxamides has been developed. The reaction proceeded under mild conditions in the presence of Co(OAc)2⋅4H2O as the ...catalyst and tolerates a wide range of both alcohols and benzamide substrates, including even olefinic carboxamides. In addition, this reaction is the first example of the direct alkoxylation of alkenes through CH bond activation.
Alcohols in action: A wide range of alcohols and benzamide substrates functionalized with electron‐rich or electron‐poor substituents are tolerated in the title reaction. This practical reaction occurs under mild conditions.
In addition to the Kitaev (K) interaction, candidate Kitaev materials also possess Heisenberg (J) and off-diagonal symmetric (Γ) couplings. We investigate the quantum (S=1/2) K−J−Γ model on the ...honeycomb lattice by a variational Monte Carlo method. In addition to the "generic" Kitaev spin liquid (KSL), we find that there is just one proximate KSL (PKSL) phase, while the rest of the phase diagram contains different magnetically ordered states. The PKSL is a gapless Z2 state with 14 Majorana cones, which in contrast to the KSL has a gapless spin response. In a magnetic field applied normal to the honeycomb plane, it realizes two of Kitaev's gapped chiral spin-liquid phases, of which one is non-Abelian with Chern number ν=5 and the other is Abelian with ν=4. These two phases could be distinguished by their thermal Hall conductance.
We propose to observe and manipulate topological edge spins in a one-dimensional optical lattice based on currently available experimental platforms. Coupling the atomic spin states to a ...laser-induced periodic Zeeman field, the lattice system can be driven into a symmetry protected topological (SPT) phase, which belongs to the chiral unitary (AIII) class protected by particle number conservation and chiral symmetries. In the free-fermion case the SPT phase is classified by a Z invariant which reduces to Z(4) with interactions. The zero edge modes of the SPT phase are spin polarized, with left and right edge spins polarized to opposite directions and forming a topological spin qubit (TSQ). We demonstrate a novel scheme to manipulate the zero modes and realize single spin control in an optical lattice. The manipulation of TSQs has potential applications to quantum computation.
Abstract
The frustrated magnet
α
-RuCl
3
constitutes a fascinating quantum material platform that harbors the intriguing Kitaev physics. However, a consensus on its intricate spin interactions and ...field-induced quantum phases has not been reached yet. Here we exploit multiple state-of-the-art many-body methods and determine the microscopic spin model that quantitatively explains major observations in
α
-RuCl
3
, including the zigzag order, double-peak specific heat, magnetic anisotropy, and the characteristic M-star dynamical spin structure, etc. According to our model simulations, the in-plane field drives the system into the polarized phase at about 7 T and a thermal fractionalization occurs at finite temperature, reconciling observations in different experiments. Under out-of-plane fields, the zigzag order is suppressed at 35 T, above which, and below a polarization field of 100 T level, there emerges a field-induced quantum spin liquid. The fractional entropy and algebraic low-temperature specific heat unveil the nature of a gapless spin liquid, which can be explored in high-field measurements on
α
-RuCl
3
.
MoN2 and MoS2 sheets are representatives of two-dimensional transition metal dinitrides and dichalcogenides, respectively. Their similarity in atomic ratios misled people to make an incorrect ...assumption in previous studies that the former adopts the geometry of the latter. However, compared with S, N is smaller and has fewer valence electrons, and N is more effective in mediating magnetic couplings; therefore, a different geometry and different properties can be expected for the MoN2 sheet. Here using a global structure search, for the first time we have identified the ground state geometry of this sheet named Tetra-MoN2 that is much more stable than the H phase proposed previously. Different from the metallic nature of H-MoN2, Tetra-MoN2 is a semiconductor having an indirect band gap of 1.41 eV with a flexible strain tunability. In particular, Tetra-MoN2 can exhibit rich half-metallic behaviors mediated by the polarized p electron of N and induced by low-concentration hole doping and small strains that are readily achievable experimentally.
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