Controlling the dynamics of spins on surfaces is pivotal to the design of spintronic and quantum computing devices. Proposed schemes involve the interaction of spins with graphene to enable surface-state spintronics and electrical spin manipulation. However, the influence of the graphene environment on the spin systems has yet to be unravelled. Here we explore the spin-graphene interaction by s...

We study the effect of coupling magnetic impurities to the honeycomb lattice spin−1/2 Kitaev model in its spin liquid phase. We show that a spin-S impurity coupled to the Kitaev model is associated with an unusual Kondo effect with an intermediate coupling unstable fixed point Kc ∼ J/S separating topologically distinct sectors of the Kitaev model. We also show that the massless spinons in the s...