Magnetic Excitations in $\alpha$-RuCl$_{3}$

The layered material $\alpha$-RuCl$_{3}$ is composed of stacks of weakly coupled honeycomb lattices of octahedrally coordinated Ru$^{3+}$ ions. The Ru ion ground state has 5 d electrons in the low spin state, with spin-orbit coupling very strong compared to other terms in the single ion Hamiltonian. The material is therefore an excellent candidate for investigating possible Heisenberg-Kitaev physics. In addition, this compound is very amenable to investigation by neutron scattering to explore the magnetic ground state and excitations in detail. Here we discuss new time-of-flight inelastic neutron scattering data on $\alpha$-RuCl$_{3}$. A high energy excitation near 200 meV is identified as a transition from the single ion J=1/2 ground state to the J=3/2 excited state, yielding a direct measurement of the spin orbit coupling energy. Higher resolution measurements reveal two collective modes at much lower energy scales. The results are compared with the theoretical expectations for excitations in the Heisenberg - Kitaev model on a honeycomb lattice, and show that Kitaev interactions are important.