Projective symmetry of partons in Kitaev's honeycomb model

Abstract

Low-energy states of quantum spin liquids are thought to involve partons living in a gauge-field background. We study the spectrum of Majorana fermions of Kitaev's honeycomb model on spherical clusters. The gauge field endows the partons with half-integer orbital angular momenta. As a consequence, the multiplicities reflect not the point-group symmetries of the cluster, but rather its projective symmetries, operations combining physical and gauge transformations. The projective symmetry group of the ground state is the double cover of the point group.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Spin Liquid States on the Triangular and Kagome Lattices: A Projective Symmetry Group Analysis of Schwinger Boson States
• Classifying fractionalization: symmetry classification of gapped Z2 spin liquids in two dimensions
• Vaporization of Kitaev spin liquids
• Landau Level Quantization on the Sphere
• Unpaired Majorana modes on dislocations and string defects in Kitaev's honeycomb model

Cited by in corpus (5)

• A Kitaev-type spin liquid on a quasicrystal
• Raman Scattering Polarization and Single Spinon Identification in Two-Dimensional Kitaev Quantum Spin Liquids
• Magnetoelectric effect in dipolar clusters
• Projective-symmetry-group analysis of inelastic light scattering in Kitaev spin balls
• Thermal features of Heisenberg antiferromagnets on edge- versus corner-sharing triangular-based lattices: A message from spin waves