Neutron diffraction study on anisotropic behaviors of alpha-RuCl3 single crystals under in-plane magnetic fields

Alpha-RuCl3 is a two-dimensional honeycomb-lattice topological quantum magnet, in which the bond-direction dependent Kitaev exchange interaction between the strongly spin-orbit coupled Ru3+ ions with Jeff = 1/2 dominates. alpha-RuCl3 has thus attracted tremendous research interests due to its proximity to QSL. Despite that alpha-RuCl3 transforms to a long-range ordered antiferromagnetic state below TN~7 K, it has been demonstrated that this zigzag magnetic order can be suppressed by magnetic fields applied parallel to the honeycomb plane theatrically and experimentally and a quantum disorder emerges, which was proposed to be a quantum spin liquid state. Our experiment will be focused on a detailed study of anisotropic behaviors of alpha-RuCl3 single under in-plane magnetic fields.