Anderson localization of emergent quasiparticles: Spinon and vison interplay at finite temperature in a ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ gauge theory in three dimensions

Abstract

Fractional statistics of quasiparticle excitations often plays an important role in the detection and characterization of topological systems. In this paper, we investigate the case of a three-dimensional (3D) Z2 gauge theory, where the excitations take the form of bosonic spinon quasiparticle and vison flux tubes, with mutual semionic statistics. We focus on an experimentally relevant intermediate temperature regime, where sparse spinons hop coherently on a dense quasistatic and stochastic vison background. The effective Hamiltonian reduces to a random-sign bimodal tight-binding model, where both the particles and the disorder are borne out of the same underlying quantum spin liquid (QSL) degrees of freedom, and the coupling between the two is purely driven by the mutual fractional statistics. We study the localization properties and observe a mobility edge located close to the band edge, whose transition belongs to the 3D Anderson model universality class. Spinons allowed to propagate through the quasistatic vison background appear to display quantum diffusive behavior. When the visons are allowed to relax, in response to the presence of spinons in equilibrium, we observe the formation of vison depletion regions slave to the support of the spinon wavefunction. We discuss how this behavior can give rise to measurable effects in the relaxation, response and transport properties of the system and how these may be used as signatures of the mutual semionic statistics and as precursors of the QSL phase arising in the system at lower temperatures.

18 pages, 15 figures. Accepted to Phys. Rev. Research on 15 Nov 2022. Current version is after final proofs

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Finite Temperature Dynamics in 0-Flux and $\pi$-Flux Quantum Spin Ice: Self-Consistent Exclusive Boson Approach
• Probing fractional statistics in quantum simulators of spin liquid Hamiltonians
• Transport in honeycomb lattice with random $\pi$-fluxes: implications for low-temperature thermal transport in the Kitaev spin liquids