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arXiv:1105.4573 · Physical Review B

Physical solutions of the Kitaev honeycomb model

Fabio L. Pedrocchi, Stefano Chesi, Daniel Loss

Published Oct 10, 2011• 85 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the exact solution of the honeycomb model proposed by Kitaev and derive an explicit formula for the projector onto the physical subspace. The physical states are simply characterized by the parity of the total occupation of the fermionic eigenmodes. We consider a general lattice on a torus and show that the physical fermion parity depends in a nontrivial way on the vortex configuration and the choice of boundary conditions. In the vortex-free case with a constant gauge field we are able to obtain an analytical expression of the parity. For a general configuration of the gauge field the parity can be easily evaluated numerically, which allows the exact diagonalization of large spin models. We consider physically relevant quantities, as in particular the vortex energies, and show that their true value and associated states can be substantially different from the one calculated in the unprojected space, even in the thermodynamic limit.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.84.165414

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We investigate the exact solution of the honeycomb model proposed by Kitaev and derive an explicit formula for the projector onto the physical subspace. The physical states are simply characterized by the parity of the total occupation of the fermionic eigenmodes. We consider a general lattice on a torus and show that the physical fermion parity depends in a nontrivial way on the vortex configuration and the choice of boundary conditions. In the vortex-free case with a constant gauge field we are able to obtain an analytical expression of the parity. For a general configuration of the gauge field the parity can be easily evaluated numerically, which allows the exact diagonalization of large spin models. We consider physically relevant quantities, as in particular the vortex energies, and show that their true value and associated states can be substantially different from the one calculated in the unprojected space, even in the thermodynamic limit.
We investigate the exact solution of the Kitaev honeycomb model and derive an explicit formula for the projector onto the physical subspace. We show that in general there is a fundamental difference between the exact solutions of the projected and unprojected models. We consider physically relevant quantities such as spin-spin correlations and vortex energies and show that their true value can be substantially different from the one calculated in the unprojected space. Our projection protocol makes it possible to numerically study large spin models, intractable by direct diagonalization, whenever Kitaev’s exact mapping is applicable.
We present a solution of Kitaev's spin model on the honeycomb lattice and of related topologically ordered spin models. We employ a Jordan-Wigner-type fermionization and find that the Hamiltonian takes a BCS-type form, allowing the system to be solved by Bogoliubov transformation. Our fermionization does not employ nonphysical auxiliary degrees of freedom and the eigenstates we obtain are completely explicit in terms of the spin variables. The ground state is obtained as a BCS condensate of fermion pairs over a vacuum state which corresponds to the toric-code state with the same vorticity. We show in detail how to calculate all eigenstates and eigenvalues of the model on the torus. In particular, we find that the topological degeneracy on the torus descends directly from that of the toric-code, which now supplies four vacua for the fermions, one for each choice of periodic vs antiperiodic boundary conditions. The reduction of the degeneracy in the non-Abelian phase of the model is seen to be due to the vanishing of one of the corresponding candidate BCS ground states in that phase. This occurs in particular in the fully periodic vortex-free sector. The true ground state in this sector is exhibited and shown to be gapped away from the three partially antiperiodic ground states whenever the non-Abelian phase is gapped.
The Kitaev honeycomb model is a paradigm of exactly solvable models, showing nontrivial physical properties such as topological quantum order, Abelian and non-Abelian anyons, and chirality. Its solution is one of the most beautiful examples of the interplay of different mathematical techniques in condensed matter physics. In this paper, we show how to derive a tensor network (TN) description of the eigenstates of this spin-1/2 model in the thermodynamic limit, and in particular for its ground state. In our setting, eigenstates are naturally encoded by an exact 3d TN structure made of fermionic unitary operators, corresponding to the unitary quantum circuit building up the many-body quantum state. In our derivation we review how the different ``solution ingredients'' of the Kitaev honeycomb model can be accounted for in the TN language, namely, Jordan-Wigner transformation, braidings of Majorana modes, fermionic Fourier transformation, and Bogoliubov transformation. The TN built in this way allows for a clear understanding of several properties of the model. In particular, we show how the fidelity diagram is straightforward both at zero temperature and at finite temperature in the vortex-free sector. We also show how the properties of two-point correlation functions follow easily. Finally, we also discuss the pros and cons of contracting of our 3d TN down to a 2d projected entangled pair state (PEPS) with finite bond dimension. The results in this paper can be extended to generalizations of the Kitaev model, e.g., to other lattices, spins, and dimensions.
We relate the Z2_22​ gauge theory formalism of the Kitaev model to the SU(2) gauge theory of the resonating valence bond (RVB) physics. Further, we reformulate a known Jordan-Wigner transformation of Kitaev model on a torus in a general way that shows that it can be thought of as a Z2_22​ gauge fixing procedure. The conserved quantities simplify in terms of the gauge invariant Jordan-Wigner fermions, enabling us to construct exact eigen states and calculate physical quantities. We calculate the fermionic spectrum for flux free sector for different gauge field configurations and show that the ground state is four-fold degenerate on a torus in thermodynamic limit. Further on a torus we construct four mutually anti-commuting operators which enable us to prove that all eigenstates of this model are four fold degenerate in thermodynamic limit.
In two dimensions, topological phases of free Majorana fermions coupled to a Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ gauge field are known to be classified according to the Chern number $\ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\in}\mathbb{Z}$. Its value mod 16 specifies the type of anyonic excitations. In this paper, we investigate triangular vortex configurations (and their dual) in the Kitaev honeycomb model and show that fourteen of these sixteen phases can be obtained by adding a time-reversal symmetry-breaking term. Missing phases are $\ensuremath{\nu}=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}7$. More generally, we prove that any periodic vortex configuration with an odd number of vortices per geometric unit cell can only host even Chern numbers whereas odd Chern numbers can be found in other cases.