Nature of Quantum Spin-liquid Ground State of a Honeycomb Kondo Lattice CePt6Al3 : µSR study

Recently, Honeycomb lattice materials have attracted considerable attraction due to the bond dependent exchange proposed by Kitaev. We have synthesised a new Ce-based Honeycomb compound CePt6Al3, which exhibits heavy Fermion behaviour and no clear sign of long range magnetic ordering. However, heat capacity exhibits a broad maximum at 0.55K indicating the development of short range correlations. Our inelastic neutron scattering (INS) study reveals one CEF excitation near 15meV at 5K, but dramatic change in the excitations at 110 and 170K, suggesting new kind of excitations. It is an open question whether the ground state is magnetic or quantum spin-liquid. We therefore propose to investigate the magnetic ground of CePt6Al3 using muon spin rotation and relaxation on MuSR/EMU. The proposed uSR results with our existing INS data will allow us to publish our results in a high impact journal.