Novel chiral quantum spin liquids in Kitaev magnets

Abstract

Mott insulators under sufficiently strong spin-orbit coupling can display quantum spin liquid phases with topological order and fractional excitations. Quantum magnets with pure Kitaev spin exchange interactions can host a gapped quantum spin liquid with a single Majorana edge mode propagating in the counter-clockwise direction when a small positive magnetic field is applied. Here, we show how under a sufficiently strong positive magnetic field a topological transition into a gapped quantum spin liquid with two Majorana edge modes propagating in the clockwise direction occurs. The Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction is found to turn the non-chiral Kitaev's gapless quantum spin liquid into a chiral one with equal Berry phases at the two Dirac points. Thermal Hall conductance experiments can provide evidence of the novel topologically gapped quantum spin liquid states predicted.

last version, 4 pages, 4 figures + Supplemental material

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• Electric-field control of magnetic anisotropies: applications to Kitaev spin liquids and topological spin textures
• Majorana chiral spin liquid in Mott insulating cuprates
• Spontaneous Chiral-Spin Ordering in Spin-Orbit Coupled Honeycomb Magnets
• Spontaneous dimerization, spin-nematic order, and deconfined quantum critical point in a spin-1 Kitaev chain with tunable single-ion anisotropy
• Dynamics of fractionalized mean-field theories: consequences for Kitaev materials
• Dynamical response theory of interacting Majorana fermions and its application to generic Kitaev quantum spin liquids in a field
• Topological phase transitions and thermal Hall effect in a noncollinear spin texture
• Emergent magnetic order in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model with a [111] field
• Classical ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ spin liquid on the generalized four-color Kitaev model
• Phonon Dynamics in the Chiral Kitaev Spin Liquid
• Chiral bosonic quantum spin liquid in the integer-spin Heisenberg-Kitaev model
• Simulation of chiral motion of excitation within the ground-state manifolds of neutral atoms
• Chiral spin liquid phase in an optical lattice at mean-field level
• Nonreciprocal heat transport in the Kitaev chiral spin liquid
• Anyon polarons as a window into competing phases of the Kitaev honeycomb model under a Zeeman field
• Electric polarization near vortices in the extended Kitaev model
• Nature of the Topological Transition of the Kitaev Model in [111] Magnetic Field