Accurate navigation to a desired goal requires consecutive estimates of spatial relationships between the current position and future destination throughout the journey. Although neurons in the hippocampal formation can represent the position of an animal as well as its nearby trajectories1–7, their role in determining the destination of the animal has been questioned8,9. It is, thus, unclear whether the brain can possess a precise estimate of target location during active environmental exploration. Here we describe neurons in the rat orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that form spatial representations persistently pointing to the subsequent goal destination of an animal throughout navigation. This destination coding emerges before the onset of navigation, without direct sensory access to a distal goal, and even predicts the incorrect destination of an animal at the beginning of an error trial. Goal representations in the OFC are maintained by destination-specific neural ensemble dynamics, and their brief perturbation at the onset of a journey led to a navigational error. These findings suggest that the OFC is part of the internal goal map of the brain, enabling animals to navigate precisely to a chosen destination that is beyond the range of sensory perception.

The low-temperature behavior of the magnetic insulator Cs2CuCl4 can be modeled by an anisotropic triangular lattice spin-1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet with two different exchange couplings J and J' = J/3. We show that in a wide range of magnetic fields the experimentally observed field dependence of the crossover temperature T_c for spin-liquid behavior can be explained within a mean-field theory based on the representation of spin operators in terms of Majorana fermions. We also show that for small magnetic fields the specific heat and the spin susceptibility both exhibit a maximum as a function of temperature at T_c = J/2. In the spin-liquid regime, the Majorana fermions can only propagate along the direction of the strongest bond, in agreement with the dimensional reduction scenario advanced by Balents [Nature (London) 464, 199 (2010)].Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

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