Order-by-disorder from bond-dependent exchange and intensity signature of nodal quasiparticles in a honeycomb cobaltate

Recent theoretical proposals have argued that cobaltates with edge-sharing octahedral coordination can have significant bond-dependent exchange couplings thus offering a platform in 3d ions for such physics beyond the much-explored realisations in 4d and 5d materials. Here we present high-resolution inelastic neutron scattering data within the magnetically ordered phase of the stacked honeycomb magnet CoTiO3 revealing the presence of a finite energy gap and demonstrate that this implies the presence of bond-dependent anisotropic couplings. We also show through an extensive theoretical analysis that the gap further implies the existence of a quantum order-by-disorder mechanism that, in this material, crucially involves virtual crystal field fluctuations. Our data also provide an experimental observation of a universal winding of the scattering intensity in angular scans around linear band-touching points for both magnons and dispersive spin-orbit excitons, which is directly related to the non-trivial topology of the quasiparticle wavefunction in momentum space near nodal points. It was suggested that some 3d materials display bond-dependent exchange interactions, leading to exotic many-body effects. Here, using inelastic neutron scattering, the authors reveal such interactions in the stacked honeycomb magnet CoTiO3 and show how they induce a spectral gap and affect the Dirac magnon band structure.