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A family of spin–orbit coupled honeycomb Mott insulators offers a playground to search for quantum spin liquids (QSLs) via bond-dependent interactions. In candidate materials, a symmetric off-diagonal Γ term, close cousin of Kitaev interaction, has emerged as another source of frustration that is essential for complete understanding of these systems. However, the ground state of honeycomb Γ model remains elusive, with a suggested zigzag magnetic order. Here we attempt to resolve the puzzle by perturbing the Γ region with a staggered Heisenberg interaction which favours the zigzag ordering. Despite such favour, we find a wide disordered region inclusive of the Γ limit in the phase diagram. Further, this phase exhibits a vanishing energy gap, a collapse of excitation spectrum, and a logarithmic entanglement entropy scaling on long cylinders, indicating a gapless QSL. Other quantities such as plaquette-plaquette correlation are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a topological insulator, the quantum Hall (QH) effect is indexed by the Chern and spin-Chern numbers C and Cspin. We have only Cspin=0 or ± ½in conventional QH systems. We investigate QH effects in generic monolayer honeycomb systems. We search for spin-resolved characteristic patterns by exploring Hofstadter's butterfly diagrams in the lattice theory and fan diagrams in the low-energy Dirac theory. It is shown that the spin-Chern number can takes an arbitrary high value for certain QH systems. This is a new type of topological insulators, which we may call high spin-Chern insulators. Samples may be provided by graphene on the SiC substrate with ferromagnetic order, transition-metal dichalcogenides with ferromagnetic order, transition-metal oxide with antiferromagnetic order and silicene with ferromagnetic order. Actually high spin-Chern insulators are ubiquitous in any systems with magnetic order. Nevertheless, the honeycomb system would provide us with unique materials for practical materialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chern insulator displays a quantum Hall effect with no net magnetic field. Proposed by Haldane over 20 years ago, it laid the foundation for the fields of topological order, unconventional quantum Hall effects, and topological insulators. Despite enormous impact over two decades, Haldane's original vision of a staggered magnetic field within a crystal lattice has been prohibitively difficult to realise. In fact, in the original paper Haldane stresses his idea is probably merely a toy model. I show that buckled lattices with only simple hopping terms, within in-plane magnetic fields, can realise these models, requiring no exotic interactions or experimental parameters. As a concrete example of this very broad, and remarkably simple principle, I consider silicene, a honeycomb lattice with out-of-plane sublattice anisotropy, in an in-plane magnetic field, and show that it is a Chern insulator, even at negligibly small magnetic fields, which is analogous to Haldane's original model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultracold fermions trapped in a honeycomb optical lattice constitute a versatile setup to experimentally realize the Haldane model (1988 Phys. Rev. Lett. 61 2015). In this system, a non-uniform synthetic magnetic flux can be engineered through laser-induced methods, explicitly breaking time-reversal symmetry. This potentially opens a bulk gap in the energy spectrum, which is associated with a non-trivial topological order, i.e. a non-zero Chern number. In this paper, we consider the possibility of producing and identifying such a robust Chern insulator in the laser-coupled honeycomb lattice. We explore a large parameter space spanned by experimentally controllable parameters and obtain a variety of phase diagrams, clearly identifying the accessible topologically non-trivial regimes. We discuss the signatures of Chern insulators in coldatom systems, considering available detection methods. We also highlight the existence of topological semi-metals in this system, which are gapless phases characterized by non-zero winding numbers, not present in Haldane's original model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Nowadays, the request to use materials preserving the environment is in strong growth. The good mechanical properties, honeycomb structure and low density of flax-shaves allow them to be used as aggregate in polymeric matrix composite. The innovation of this work consists in introducing a simple manufacturing process of agro-composites based on flax-shaves (non-industrial flax-fiber fraction) for various applications (packaging, insulation, construction, …). Using scanning electron microscopy, the structure and morphology of the composites have been analysed. This investigation is focused on the effects of the flax-shave content and size on the mechanical, thermal, hydric and acoustic properties of the composites. The compressive and flexural stresses at failure decrease as a function of flax-shave content and size. The environment has very significant effects on thermal stability and durability of these materials. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We propose and construct a numerical algorithm to calculate the Berry conductivity in topological band insulators. The method is applicable to cold atom systems as well as solid state setups, both for the insulating case where the Fermi energy lies in the gap between two bulk bands as well as in the metallic regime. This method interpolates smoothly between both regimes. The algorithm is gauge-invariant by construction, efficient, and yields the Berry conductivity with known and controllable statistical error bars. We apply the algorithm to several paradigmatic models in the field of topological insulators, including Haldaneʼs model on the honeycomb lattice, the multi-band Hofstadter model, and the BHZ model, which describes the 2D spin Hall effect observed in CdTe/HgTe/CdTe quantum well heterostructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]