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arXiv:2004.00640 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Field stability of Majorana spin liquids in antiferromagnetic Kitaev models

Christoph Berke, Simon Trebst, Ciarán Hickey

Published Jun 29, 2020• 14 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Magnetic fields can give rise to a plethora of phenomena in Kitaev spin systems, such as the formation of nontrivial spin liquids in two and three spatial dimensions. For the original honeycomb Kitaev model, it has recently been observed that the sign of the bond-directional exchange is of crucial relevance for the field-induced physics, with antiferromagnetic couplings giving rise to an intermediate spin liquid regime between the low-field gapped Kitaev spin liquid and the high-field polarized state, which is not present in the ferromagnetically coupled model. Here, by employing a Majorana mean-field approach for a magnetic field pointing along the [001] direction, we present a systematic study of field-induced spin liquid phases for a variety of two and three-dimensional lattice geometries. We find that antiferromagnetic couplings generically lead to (i) spin liquid phases that are considerably more stable in field than those for ferromagnetic couplings, and (ii) an intermediate spin liquid phase which arises from a change in the topology of the Majorana band structure. Close inspection of the mean-field parameters reveal that the intermediate phase occurs due to a field-driven sign change in an `effective' $z$-bond energy parameter. Our results clearly demonstrate the richness of the Majorana physics of the antiferromagnetic Kitaev models, in comparison to their ferromagnetic counterparts.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.101.214442

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Magnetic fields can give rise to a plethora of phenomena in Kitaev spin systems, such as the formation of nontrivial spin liquids in two and three spatial dimensions. For the original honeycomb Kitaev model, it has recently been observed that the sign of the bond-directional exchange is of crucial relevance for the field-induced physics, with antiferromagnetic couplings giving rise to an intermediate spin liquid regime between the low-field gapped Kitaev spin liquid and the high-field polarized state, which is not present in the ferromagnetically coupled model. Here, by employing a Majorana mean-field approach for a magnetic field pointing along the [001] direction, we present a systematic study of field-induced spin liquid phases for a variety of two and three-dimensional lattice geometries. We find that antiferromagnetic couplings generically lead to (i) spin liquid phases that are considerably more stable in field than those for ferromagnetic couplings, and (ii) an intermediate spin liquid phase which arises from a change in the topology of the Majorana band structure. Close inspection of the mean-field parameters reveal that the intermediate phase occurs due to a field-driven sign change in an `effective' zzz-bond energy parameter. Our results clearly demonstrate the richness of the Majorana physics of the antiferromagnetic Kitaev models, in comparison to their ferromagnetic counterparts.
Topological spin liquids in two spatial dimensions are stable phases in the presence of a small magnetic field, but may give way to field-induced phenomena at intermediate field strengths. Sandwiched between the low-field spin liquid physics and the high-field spin-polarized phase, the exploration of magnetic phenomena in this intermediate regime, however, often remains elusive to controlled analytical approaches. Here we numerically study such intermediate-field magnetic phenomena for two representative Kitaev models (on the square-octagon and decorated honeycomb lattice) that exhibit either Abelian or non-Abelian topological order in the low-field limit. Using a combination of exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group techniques, as well as linear spin-wave theory, we establish the generic features of Kitaev spin liquids in an external magnetic field. While ferromagnetic models typically exhibit a direct transition to the polarized state at a relatively low field strength, antiferromagnetic couplings not only substantially stabilizes the topological spin liquid phase, but generically lead to the emergence of a distinct field-induced intermediate regime, separated by a crossover from the high-field polarized regime. Our results suggest that, for most lattice geometries, this regime generically exhibits significant spin canting, antiferromagnetic spin-spin correlations, and an extended proximate spin liquid regime at finite temperatures. Notably, we identify a symmetry obstruction in the original honeycomb Kitaev model that prevents, at least for certain field directions, the formation of such canted magnetism without breaking symmetries---consistent with the recent numerical observation of an extended gapless spin liquid in this case.
We study quantum phase transitions in the honeycomb Kitaev model under a magnetic field, focusing on the topological nature of Majorana fermion excitations. We find a gapless phase between the low-field gapless quantum spin liquid and the high-field gapped forced-ferromagnetic state for the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model in the [001] field by using the Majorana mean-field theory, in conjunction with the exact diagonalization and the spin-wave theory supporting the validity of this approach. The transition between the two gapless phases is driven by a topological change of the Majorana spectrum---line node formation interconnecting two Majorana cones. The peculiar change of the Majorana band topology is rationalized by a sign change of the effective Kitaev coupling by the magnetic field, which does not occur in the ferromagnetic Kitaev case. Upon tilting the magnetic field away from [001], the two gapless phases become gapped and topologically nontrivial, characterized by nonzero Chern numbers with different signs. The sign change of the Chern number leads to a reversal of the thermal edge current in the half-quantized thermal Hall effect.
This paper studies the phase diagram for the SSS=1 Kitaev model using a density renormalization group method. The authors find a gapped Kitaev spin liquid with topological nature for both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Kitaev couplings. Further, the the antiferromagnetic Kitaev coupling hosts a more robust topological spin liquid with an additional nonmagnetic intermediate phase
We investigate the nature of the topological phase transition of the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model on a honeycomb lattice in the presence of a magnetic field along the [111] direction. The field opens a topological gap in the Majorana fermion spectrum and leads to a sequence of topological phase transitions before the field-polarized state is reached. At mean-field level, the gap first closes at the three M points in the Brillouin zone, where the Majorana fermions form Dirac cones, resulting in a change of Chern number by three. An odd number of Dirac fermions in infrared is unusual and requires Berry curvature compensation in ultraviolet, which occurs via topological, ringlike hybridization gaps with higher-energy bands. We perform a renormalization-group analysis of the topological phase transition at the three M points within the Yukawa theory, allowing for intravalley and intervalley fluctuations of the spin-liquid bond operators. We find that the latter lead to a breaking of Lorentz invariance and hence a different universality compared with the standard Ising Gross-Neveu-Yukawa class.
We investigate the non-Abelian topological chiral spin liquid phase in the two-dimensional (2D) Kitaev honeycomb model subject to a magnetic field. By combining density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and exact diagonalization (ED) we study the energy spectra, entanglement, topological degeneracy, and expectation values of Wilson loop operators, allowing for robust characterization. While the ferromagnetic (FM) Kitaev spin liquid is already destroyed by a weak magnetic field with Zeeman energy H∗FM≈0.02H_*^\text{FM} \approx 0.02H∗FM​≈0.02, the antiferromagnetic (AFM) spin liquid remains robust up to a magnetic field that is an order of magnitude larger, H∗AFM≈0.2H_*^\text{AFM} \approx 0.2H∗AFM​≈0.2. Interestingly, for larger fields H∗AFM<H<H∗∗AFMH_*^\text{AFM} < H < H_{**}^\text{AFM}H∗AFM​<H<H∗∗AFM​, an intermediate gapless phase is observed, before a second transition to the high-field partially-polarized paramagnet. We attribute this rich phase diagram, and the remarkable stability of the chiral topological phase in the AFM Kitaev model, to the interplay of strong spin-orbit coupling and frustration enhanced by the magnetic field. We discuss possible relevance of this result to RuCl3_33​ under various magnetic fields.
We have studied the anti-ferromagnetic Kitaev model on a honeycomb lattice under the Zeeman field, using an extensive Majorana mean-field analysis. When the magnetic field is along a specific Cartesian axis, we find that the emergent fields exhibit direction-dependent stabilization up to a certain critical strength of the external field. For a conical magnetic field, the characteristics of the emergent intermediate state are elusive. Our mean-field analysis reveals the existence of two distinct phases in the intermediate region. First, the system enters a disordered phase, where emergent-field densities converge to random values, and the Chern number is ill-defined. The magnitude of magnetization also fluctuates and remains less than unity, indicating a strong quantum effect. In the second phase, emergent-field densities attain vanishingly small values. In this phase, the magnetization components fluctuate heavily, but the magnitude of the magnetization vectors becomes unity, indicating highly degenerate classical ground states. We perform exact diagonalization calculations that qualitatively support some of the mean-field results. We extend our study to the anisotropic limit of the Kitaev coupling parameters. When the couplings are beyond the triangular inequality, the pure Kitaev model is known to host a topologically trivial gapped quantum spin liquid. We find that, for intermediate strengths of a conical magnetic field, topology shows a reentrant behavior.