Analytic calculation of the vison gap in the Kitaev spin liquid

Abstract

Although the ground-state energy of the Kitaev spin liquid can be calculated exactly, the associated vison gap energy has to date only been calculated numerically from finite size diagonalization. Here we show that the phase shift for scattering Majorana fermions off a single bond-flip can be calculated analytically, leading to a closed-form expression for the vison gap energy $\Delta =0.2633J$. Generalizations of our approach can be applied to Kitaev spin liquids on more complex lattices such as the three dimensional hyper-octagonal lattice.

7 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (10)

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• Vacancy-induced low-energy density of states in the Kitaev spin liquid
• Dynamics of visons and thermal Hall effect in perturbed Kitaev models
• A solvable 3D Kondo lattice exhibiting odd-frequency pairing and order fractionalization
• Universal Thermodynamics in the Kitaev Fractional Liquid
• Further insights into the thermodynamics of the Kitaev honeycomb model
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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Breakdown of order-fractionalization in the CPT model
• Gauge Field Dynamics in Multilayer Kitaev Spin Liquids
• Interplay of Kitaev Interaction and Off-diagonal Exchanges: Exotic Phases and Quantum Phase Diagrams
• Electric polarization near vortices in the extended Kitaev model
• Real-time control of non-Abelian anyons in Kitaev spin liquid under energy dissipation
• Static and Dynamical Spin Correlations in the Kitaev Model at Finite Temperatures via Green's Function Equation of Motion
• Majorana Signatures in Planar Tunneling through a Kitaev Spin Liquid