We address the effects of disorder in the Kitaev honeycomb model, focussing on the interplay of disorder and strong interactions in a quantum spin liquid. It is shown that nonmagnetic impurities bind a quantum of the emergent gauge flux. We find the formation of a local moment, which leads to a local magnetic response near the impurity which is parametrically larger than in the bulk. The magnetic response of a pair of impurities can be parametrically larger than that of an isolated one, and can in particular dominate the magnetic response of the system. The role of such impurities as diagnostic of the spin liquid state are emphasized – most remarkably, they provide a direct signature of the emergent gauge field.
We address the effects of disorder in the Kitaev honeycomb model, focussing on the interplay of disorder and strong interactions in a quantum spin liquid. It is shown that nonmagnetic impurities bind a quantum of the emergent gauge flux. We find the formation of a local moment, which leads to a local magnetic response near the impurity which is parametrically larger than in the bulk. The magnetic response of a pair of impurities can be parametrically larger than that of an isolated one, and can in particular dominate the magnetic response of the system. The role of such impurities as diagnostic of the spin liquid state are emphasized – most remarkably, they provide a direct signature of the emergent gauge field.
We study the effect of adding disorder to the Kitaev model on the hyperhoneycomb lattice, which hosts both gapped and gapless spin liquid phases with an emergent Z2 gauge field. The latter has an unusual gapless spectrum of Majorana fermion excitations, with a co-dimension-two Fermi ring. We thus address the question of the interplay of topological physics and disorder by considering the properties of isolated single and pairs of vacancies. We show that near the vacancies, the local magnetic response to a field hz is parametrically enhanced in comparison to the pristine bulk. Unlike the previously studied case of the 2D honeycomb Kitaev model, the vacancies do not bind a flux of the Z2 gauge field. In the gapped phase, an isolated vacancy gives rise to effectively free spin-half moments with a nonuniversal coupling to an external field. In the gapless phase, the low-field magnetization is suppressed parametrically to ${(\ensuremath{-}ln{h}_{z})}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ because of interactions with the surrounding spin liquid. We also show that a pair of vacancies is subject to a sublattice-dependent interaction on account of coupling through the bulk spin liquid, which is spatially anisotropic even when all Kitaev couplings have equal strength. This coupling is thus exponentially suppressed with distance in the gapped phase. In the gapless phase, two vacancies on the same (opposite) sublattice exhibit an enhanced (suppressed) low-field response, amounting to an effectively (anti-)ferromagnetic interaction.
The Kitaev honeycomb model supports gapless and gapped quantum spin liquid phases. Its exact solvability relies on extensively many locally conserved quantities. Any real-world manifestation of these phases would include imperfections in the form of disorder and interactions that break integrability. We show that the latter qualitatively alters the properties of vacancies in the gapless Kitaev spin liquid: (i) Isolated vacancies carry a magnetic moment, which is absent in the exactly solvable case. (ii) Pairs of vacancies on even or opposite sublattices gap each other with distinct power laws that reveal the presence of emergent gauge flux.
Paramagnetic impurities in a quantum spin liquid give rise to Kondo effects with highly unusual properties. We have studied the effect of locally coupling a paramagnetic impurity with the spin-21 honeycomb Kitaev model in its gapless spin-liquid phase. The (impurity) scaling equations are found to be insensitive to the sign of the coupling. The weak and strong coupling fixed points are stable, with the latter corresponding to a noninteracting vacancy and an interacting, spin-1 defect for the antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic cases, respectively. The ground state in the strong coupling limit in both cases has a nontrivial topology associated with a finite Z2 flux at the impurity site. For the antiferromagnetic case, this result has been obtained straightforwardly owing to the integrability of the Kitaev model with a vacancy. The strong-coupling limit of the ferromagnetic case is, however, nonintegrable, and we address this problem through exact-diagonalization calculations with finite Kitaev fragments. Our exact diagonalization calculations indicate that the weak-to-strong coupling transition and the topological phase transition occur rather close to each other and are possibly coincident. We also find an intriguing similarity between the magnetic response of the defect and the impurity susceptibility in the two-channel Kondo problem.
We investigate the properties of the Kitaev honeycomb model with both site dilution and exchange randomness. Embarking on this work, we review disorder in some strongly correlated electron systems, including spin-½ and spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chains, two dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnets, the cuprates and graphene. We outline some aspects of resonating valence bond phases, valence bond solids, spin liquids and quantum computation that are pertinent to an understanding of the Kitaev model. The properties of the Kitaev model without disorder are discussed and it is found to be a critical spin liquid, with algebraic correlations in two spin operators sigma^{alpha}_{i}sigma^{alpha}_{j}, where i and j are either end of a link of type alpha = x, y or z on the honeycomb lattice. The Kitaev model is exactly solvable and we show that this remains so in the presence of site dilution and exchange randomness. We find that vacancies bind a flux. In the gapped phase, a vacancy forms an effective paramagnetic moment. With two or more vacancies we describe the interaction of their effective moments and show that a finite density of vacancies leads to a divergent macroscopic susceptibility at small fields. In the gapless phase the effective moment has a susceptibility that is, to leading order at small fields, chi(h)~log(1/h). Interaction between the moments from two vacancies on opposite sublattices cuts off this divergence in susceptibility at a large but finite constant. Two vacancies on the same sublattice behave quite differently and we find the combined susceptibility is parametrically larger than that of an isolated vacancy, chi(h)sim [h(log(1/h))^{3/2}]^{-1}. We also investigate the effects of slowly varying, quenched disorder in exchange coupling. We demonstrate that this does not qualitatively affect the susceptibility but show that the heat capacity C ~ T^{2/z}, where z is a measure of the disorder and increases from one with increasing disorder strength.
We study the consequences of disorder in the Kitaev honeycomb model, considering both site dilution and exchange randomness. We show that a single vacancy binds a flux and induces a local moment. This moment is polarized by an applied field h: in the gapless phase, for small h the local susceptibility diverges as χ(h)∼ln(1/h); for a pair of nearby vacancies on the same sublattice, this even increases to χ(h)∼1/(h[ln(1/h)](3/2)). By contrast, weak exchange randomness does not qualitatively alter the susceptibility but has its signature in the heat capacity, which in the gapless phase is power law in temperature with an exponent dependent on disorder strength.
We investigate the properties of the Kitaev honeycomb model with both site dilution
and exchange randomness. Embarking on this work, we review disorder in some strongly correlated electron systems, including spin-½ and spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chains, two dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnets, the cuprates and graphene. We outline some aspects of resonating valence bond phases, valence bond solids, spin liquids and quantum computation that are pertinent to an understanding of the Kitaev model. The properties of the Kitaev model without disorder are discussed and it is found to be a critical spin liquid, with algebraic correlations in two spin operators sigma^{alpha}_{i}sigma^{alpha}_{j}, where i and j,/em> are either end of a link of type alpha = x, y or z on the honeycomb lattice.
The Kitaev model is exactly solvable and we show that this remains so in the presence of site dilution and exchange randomness. We find that vacancies bind a flux. In the gapped phase, a vacancy forms an effective paramagnetic moment. With two or more vacancies we describe the interaction of their effective moments and show that a finite density of vacancies leads to a divergent macroscopic susceptibility at small fields.
In the gapless phase the effective moment has a susceptibility that is, to leading order at small fields, chi(h)~log(1/h). Interaction between the moments from two vacancies on opposite sublattices cuts off this divergence in susceptibility at a large but finite constant. Two vacancies on the same sublattice behave quite differently and we find the combined susceptibility is parametrically larger than that of an isolated vacancy, chi(h)sim [h(log(1/h))^{3/2}]^{-1}.
We also investigate the effects of slowly varying, quenched disorder in exchange coupling. We demonstrate that this does not qualitatively affect the susceptibility but show that the heat capacity C ~ T^{2/z}, where z is a measure of the disorder and increases from one with increasing disorder strength.