Nature of visons in the perturbed ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Kitaev honeycomb models

Abstract

The Kitaev honeycomb model hosts a fascinating fractionalized state of matter featuring emergent Majorana fermions and a vison particle that carries the flux of an emergent gauge field. In the exactly solvable model these visons are static but certain perturbations can induce their motion. We show that the nature of the vison motion induced by a Zeeman field is sharply distinct in the ferromagnetic vs the antiferromagnetic Kitaev models. Namely, in the ferromagnetic model the vison has a trivial non-projective translational symmetry, whereas in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model it has a projective translational symmetry with $\pi$-flux per unit cell. The vison band of the ferromagnetic case has zero Berry curvature, and no associated intrinsic contribution to the thermal Hall effect. In contrast, in the antiferromagnetic case there are two gapped vison bands with opposite Chern numbers and an associated intrinsic vison contribution to the thermal Hall effect. We discuss these findings in the light of the physics of the spin liquid candidate $\alpha$-RuCl${}_3$.

15 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (10)

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• Models and Materials for Generalized Kitaev Magnetism
• Scattering Continuum and Possible Fractionalized Excitations in $\alpha$-RuCl${}_3$
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• Kitaev magnetism in honeycomb RuCl3 with intermediate spin-orbit coupling
• Classifying fractionalization: symmetry classification of gapped Z2 spin liquids in two dimensions
• Magnetic anisotropy in the Kitaev model systems Na2IrO3 and RuCl3
• The sign of the overlap of HFB wave functions
• Theory of the field-revealed Kitaev spin liquid
• Evidence for the first-order topological phase transition in a Kitaev spin liquid candidate $\alpha$-RuCl${}_3$

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Thermal Hall effects in quantum magnets
• Dynamical response theory of interacting Majorana fermions and its application to generic Kitaev quantum spin liquids in a field
• Field-driven spatiotemporal manipulation of Majorana zero modes in a Kitaev spin liquid
• Gauge Field Dynamics in Multilayer Kitaev Spin Liquids
• Anyon polarons as a window into competing phases of the Kitaev honeycomb model under a Zeeman field
• Jordan-Wigner fermionization of quantum spin systems on arbitrary 2D lattices: A mutual Chern-Simons approach
• Field tuning Kitaev systems for spin fractionalization and topological order
• Real-time control of non-Abelian anyons in Kitaev spin liquid under energy dissipation
• Microscopic theory of field-tuned topological transitions in the Kitaev honeycomb model
• Raman spectroscopy of anyons in generic Kitaev spin liquids
• Jordan-Wigner composite-fermion liquids in 2D quantum spin-ice
• Transport in honeycomb lattice with random $\pi$-fluxes: implications for low-temperature thermal transport in the Kitaev spin liquids