Perturbations in the spin-orbital liquid (the Yao-Lee model)

Abstract

I investigate the stability of the spin-orbital liquid described by the Yao-Lee model in the presence of multiple perturbations that naturally arise in a recently proposed microscopic realization. While most perturbations are irrelevant and do not qualitatively alter the exact solvability, we find that the Kitaev interaction plays a special role: it couples to the ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ gauge field and renders the visons mobile.

3 pages, 2 figures