Fig. 1: Schematic illustration of spinons and triplons in anisotropic triangular antiferromagnets.

a Flipping a local spin (red arrows) creates two domain walls (pink fold), corresponding to spinons carrying S = 1/2. The two spinons propagate freely along the chain direction. b The spinons can hop between the chains by forming their bound states (green oval). Pairs of the confined spinons constitute triplons carrying S = 1. c Dispersions of the spinon continuum (pink shading) and triplon (green line). d Sketch of (bθ) and (θθ) polarization configurations for angle-resolved Raman experiments. e, f Representative magnetic Raman continuum in (θθ) polarization with θ = 0° and 60°. The magnetic continuum is decomposed into two spin excitations: triplons (green shading denoted by T) and two spinon-antispinon pair excitations (pink shading denoted by S). The triplon and spinon contributions are modeled by Gaussian and Lorentzian line profiles, respectively.