We extend the Yao-Kivelson decorated honeycomb lattice Kitaev model [H. Yao and S. A. Kivelson, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 247203 (2007)] of an exactly solvable chiral spin liquid by including disordered exchange couplings. We have determined the phase diagram of this system and found that disorder enlarges the region of the topological non-Abelian phase with finite Chern number. We study the energy level statistics as a function of disorder and other parameters in the Hamiltonian, and show that the phase transition between the non-Abelian and Abelian phases of the model at large disorder can be associated with pair annihilation of extended states at zero energy. Analogies to integer quantum Hall systems, topological Anderson insulators, and disordered topological Chern insulators are discussed.
Topological insulator phases of non-interacting particles have been generalized from periodic crystals to amorphous lattices, which raises the question whether topologically ordered quantum many-body phases may similarly exist in amorphous systems? Here we construct a soluble chiral amorphous quantum spin liquid by extending the Kitaev honeycomb model to random lattices with fixed coordination number three. The model retains its exact solubility but the presence of plaquettes with an odd number of sides leads to a spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry. We unearth a rich phase diagram displaying Abelian as well as a non-Abelian quantum spin liquid phases with a remarkably simple ground state flux pattern. Furthermore, we show that the system undergoes a finite-temperature phase transition to a conducting thermal metal state and discuss possible experimental realisations.
Thermodynamic properties of chiral spin liquids are investigated for a variant of the Kitaev model defined on a decorated honeycomb lattice. Using the quantum Monte Carlo simulation, we find that the model exhibits a finite-temperature phase transition associated with the time reversal symmetry breaking, in both topologically trivial and nontrivial regions. Numerical results for the Chern number and the thermal Hall conductivity indicate that the phase transition changes from a continuous to a discontinuous transition as we vary the coupling constants to reach the non-Abelian phase coming from the Abelian phase of the model. In addition, we find as a diagnostic of the chiral spin liquids, successive crossovers with multistage entropy release above the critical temperature, which indicates that the hierarchical fractionalization of a quantum spin occurs differently between the two regions.
Quantum circuits have been shown to be a fertile ground for realizing long-range entangled phases of matter. While various quantum double models with non-chiral topological order have been theoretically investigated and experimentally implemented, the realization and characterization of chiral topological phases have remained less explored. Here we show that chiral topological phases in spin systems, i.e., chiral spin liquids, can be prepared in quantum circuits using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) framework. On top of the VQE ground state, signatures of the chiral topological order are revealed using the recently proposed tangent space excitation ansatz for quantum circuits. We show that, both topological ground state degeneracy and the chiral edge mode can be faithfully captured by this approach. We demonstrate our approach using the Kitaev honeycomb model, finding excellent agreement of low-energy excitation spectrum on quantum circuits with exact solution in all topological sectors. Further applying this approach to a non-exactly solvable chiral spin liquid model on square lattice, the results suggest this approach works well even when the topological sectors are not exactly known.
We consider a family of generalized Rokhsar-Kivelson (RK) Hamiltonians, which are reverse-engineered to have an arbitrary edge-weighted superposition of dimer coverings as their exact ground state at the RK point. We focus on a quantum dimer model on the triangular lattice, with doubly periodic edge weights. For simplicity we consider a
2×1 periodic model in which all weights are set to one except for a tunable horizontal edge weight labeled
α. We analytically show that the model exhibits a continuous quantum phase transition at
α=3, changing from a topological
Z2 quantum spin liquid (
α<3) to a columnar ordered state (
α>3). The dimer-dimer correlator decays exponentially on both sides of the transition with the correlation length
ξ∝1/∣α−3∣ and as a power-law at criticality. The vison correlator exhibits an exponential decay in the spin liquid phase, but becomes a constant in the ordered phase, which we explain in terms of loop statistics of the double-dimer model. Using finite-size scaling of the vison correlator, we extract critical exponents consistent with the 2D Ising universality class. Additionally, we analytically show that the topological Rényi entropy of order
∞ (topological min-entropy) changes from
log2 for the quantum spin liquid phase
α<3, to
0 for the ordered phase
α>3, thereby analytically confirming the topological nature of the phase transition.
We analyze the properties of a non-Abelian spin-one chiral spin liquid state proposed by Greiter and Thomale [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 207203 (2009)] using Monte Carlo. In this state the bosonic $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ Moore-Read Pfaffian wave function is used to describe a gas of bosonic spin flips on a square lattice with one flux quantum per plaquette. For toroidal geometries there is a three-dimensional space of these states corresponding to the topological degeneracy of the bosonic Moore-Read state on the torus. We show that spin correlations for different states in this space become indistinguishable for large system size. We also calculate the Renyi entanglement entropy for different system partitions to extract the topological entanglement entropy and provide evidence that the topological order of the lattice spin-liquid state is the same as that of the continuum Moore-Read state from which it is constructed.