Spin-Peierls Instability of Three-Dimensional Spin Liquids with Majorana Fermi Surfaces

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) variants of the Kitaev model can harbor gapless spin liquids with a Majorana Fermi surface on certain tricoordinated lattice structures such as the recently introduced hyperoctagon lattice. Here we investigate Fermi surface instabilities arising from additional spin exchange terms (such as a Heisenberg coupling) which introduce interactions between the emergent Majorana fermion degrees of freedom. We show that independent of the sign and structure of the interactions, the Majorana surface is always unstable. Generically the system spontaneously doubles its unit cell at exponentially small temperatures and forms a spin liquid with line nodes. Depending on the microscopics further symmetries of the system can be broken at this transition. These spin-Peierls instabilities of a 3D spin liquid are closely related to BCS instabilities of fermions.

7 pages, 3 figures

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• Topological Nematic Phase Transition in Kitaev Magnets Under Applied Magnetic Fields
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• Supersymmetry on the lattice: Geometry, Topology, and Flat Bands
• Chasing the spin gap through the phase diagram of a frustrated Mott insulator
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• Entanglement in 3D Kitaev Spin Liquids
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• Emergent spacetime supersymmetry at 2D fractionalized quantum criticality
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• Nesting instability of gapless U(1) spin liquids with spinon Fermi pockets in two dimensions
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