Thermal Transport in a one-dimensional Z${}_2$ Spin Liquid

Abstract

We study the dynamical thermal conductivity of the Kitaev spin model on a two-leg ladder. In contrast to conventional integrable one-dimensional spin systems, we show that heat transport is completely dissipative. This is a direct consequence of fractionalization of spins into mobile Majorana matter and a static $Z_2$ gauge field, which acts as an emergent thermally activated disorder. Our finding rests on three complementary calculations of the current correlation function, comprising a phenomenological mean-field treatment of thermal gauge fluctuations, a complete summation over all gauge sectors, as well as exact diagonalization of the original spin model. The results will also be contrasted against the conductivity discarding gauge fluctuations.

6 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Finite-temperature transport in one-dimensional quantum lattice models
• Thermal Transport in the Kitaev Model
• Phonon renormalization in the Kitaev quantum spin liquid
• Logarithmic entanglement growth from disorder-free localization in the two-leg compass ladder
• Thermal transport in a two-dimensional ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ spin liquid
• Magnetization and energy dynamics in spin ladders: Evidence of diffusion in time, frequency, position, and momentum
• Heat transport in the anisotropic Kitaev spin liquid
• Flux mobility delocalization in the Kitaev spin ladder
• Spin dynamics of the generalized quantum spin compass chain
• Emergent glassiness in disorder-free Kitaev model: Density matrix renormalization group study on a one-dimensional ladder setting
• Spin liquid fingerprints in the thermal transport of a Kitaev-Heisenberg ladder
• High temperature dynamics in quantum compass models
• Finite-momentum energy dynamics in a Kitaev magnet