Conférence : "Thermal Hall effect in quantum materials" à Toulouse

Resume

The recent observation of a thermal Hall effect in a number of insulators raises the tantalizing possibility that this experimental probe could be used to detect exotic excitations like Majorana fermions, chiral magnons or spinons – in particular in magnetic materials that are considered good candidates for hosting spin-liquid states

In this talk, I will review the subject of the thermal Hall effect in quantum materials and show that in many cases it is in fact phonons that are responsible for the effect, as in cuprate superconductors and Mott insulators, for example. This raises the fascinating question of the mechanism by which phonons generate a thermal Hall response in the presence of a magnetic field – a subject of active theoretical interest.