Unambiguous Experimental Verification of Linear-in-Temperature Spinon Thermal Conductivity in an Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Chain.

The everlasting interest in spin chains is mostly rooted in the fact that they generally allow for comparisons between theory and experiment with remarkable accuracy, especially for exactly solvable models. A notable example is the spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain (AFHC), which can be well described by the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory and exhibits fractionalized spinon excitations with distinct thermodynamic and spectroscopic experimental signatures consistent with theoretical predictions. A missing piece, however, is the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the spinon heat transport in AFHC systems, due to difficulties in its experimental evaluation against the backdrop of other heat carriers and complex scattering processes. Here we address this situation by performing ultralow-temperature thermal conductivity measurements on a nearly ideal spin-1/2 AFHC system copper benzoate Cu(C_{6}H_{5}COO)_{2}·3H_{2}O, whose field-dependent spin excitation gap enables a reliable extraction of the spinon thermal conductivity κ_{s} at zero field. κ_{s} was found to exhibit a linear temperature dependence κ_{s}∼T at low temperatures, with κ_{s}/T as large as 1.70 mW cm^{-1} K^{-2}, followed by a precipitate decline below ∼0.3 K. The observed κ_{s}∼T clarifies the discrepancies between various spin chain systems and serves as a benchmark for one-dimensional spinon heat transport in the low-temperature limit. The abrupt loss of κ_{s} with no corresponding anomaly in the specific heat is discussed in the context of many-body localization.

Heritability of metabolic syndrome traits among healthy younger adults: a population based study in China.

OBJECTIVE To estimate heritability of metabolic syndrome traits among healthy younger adults in a human population in China, and examine potential sex differences in heritability and parental effect on metabolic syndrome traits. METHODS Using offspring-parent regression, we estimated heritability (h(2)) of metabolic syndrome traits based on 452 child-parent triads identified from a population based random survey on metabolic syndrome among people over 15 years of age in Guangzhou, China. RESULTS Body mass index (BMI), cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), fasting plasma glucose (FPG) and waist circumference (waist-C) were more heritable (h(2), 0.42-0.545), whereas systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and triglycerides (TG) were less heritable (h(2), 0.14-0.28). Sons had pronounced increases in heritability for all traits over daughters, particularly for cholesterol (0.653 vs 0.356), FPG (0.602 vs 0.313), LDL-C (0.521 vs 0.329), and TG (0.395 vs 0.187). Offspring-mother seemed to have a higher heritability in every trait except FPG (0.67 vs 0.794) than offspring-father, most notably for DBP (0.308 vs 0.122), SBP (0.288 vs 0.146), TG (0.387 vs 0.239) and waist-C (0.581 vs 0.354). CONCLUSION We estimated the heritability of metabolic syndrome traits in a human population based on a unique population based offspring-parent sample from China, and found important evidence that the maternal and paternal effects on these traits are different and the sex difference in heritability is pronounced.

Anomalous helimagnetic domain shrinkage due to the weakening of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in CrAs.

CrAs is a well-known helimagnet with the double-helix structure originating from the competition between the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) and antiferromagnetic exchange interaction J. By resonant soft-x-ray scattering, we observe the magnetic peak (0 0 qm) that emerges at the helical transition with TS ≈ 267.5 K. Intriguingly, the helimagnetic domains significantly shrink on cooling below ~255 K, opposite to the conventional thermal effect. The weakening of DMI on cooling is found to play a critical role here. It causes the helical wave vector to vary, ordered spins to rotate, and extra helimagnetic domain boundaries to form at local defects, thus leading to the anomalous shrinkage of helimagnetic domains. Our results indicate that the size of magnetic helical domains can be controlled by tuning DMI in certain helimagnets.