Gapped Low Energy Excitations Across an Entanglement Percolation Transition in the Quantum Spin Liquid Candidate NaYbSe₂

The study of quantum magnetism in frustrated triangular lattices has promised the discovery of exotic excitations emerging from many-body entanglement, like the quantum spin liquid. This field is vexed by the interplay of disorder, correlations and long-range order, whose properties are challenging to control and disentangle. We study the entropy-carrying excitations of a leading candidate in this search, the material NaYbSe₂, as a function of site dilution to directly address this challenge. We map the evolution of the entangled spins across the percolation transition, showing unequivocal evidence for the presence of an energy gap in the excitations of the system. However, we also show that this gap onsets at the percolation transition where disorder is the greatest, strongly suggesting that it is unlikely be associated with a quantum spin liquid. Instead we suggest the more universal scenario of a short-range ordered state with entropy-carrying boundaries.