X-Ray diffraction study of the Kitaev candidate Na2IrO3 under uniaxial strain

Kitaev systems have attracted a lot of attention this last decade as they have been theoretically predicted to exhibit a very exotic and intriguing quantum phase of matter called a quantum spin liquid phase, where no magnetic order occurs but rather a strong quantum entanglement between particles, usually characterized by fractionalized excitations. Some strong spin-orbital entangled Jeff = 1/2 honeycomb systems such as Na2IrO3 exhibit such Kitaev interactions. However they have been shown to magnetically order due to other interactions driving those systems away from the pure Kitaev case. These interactions are strongly believed to arise from the distortions of the Ir-O-Ir angles away from 90°. Here we propose to perform a high precision diffraction experiment on NaIr2O3 under uniaxial strain to probe how the atomic positions and those angles are affected.