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The Journal of Physical Chemistry A

Lattice Defects in the Kitaev Honeycomb Model

John Brennan, Jiří Vala

Published Feb 17, 2016• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Kitaev honeycomb lattice system is an important model of topological materials whose phase diagram exhibits both abelian and non-abelian topological phases. The latter, a so-called Ising phase, is related to topological superconductors. Its quasiparticle excitations, which are formed by Majorana fermions attached to vortices, show non-abelian fractional statistics and are known as Ising anyons. We investigate dislocation defects in the Ising phase of the Kitaev honeycomb model. After introducing them to the system, we accordingly generalize our solution of this model to the situation with the defects. The important part of this effort is developing an appropriate Jordan-Wigner fermionization procedure. It is expected that the presence of defects manifests itself by the formation of fermionic zero-energy modes around the defect end points. We numerically confirm this expectation and further investigate properties of these modes. The computational potential of our technique is demonstrated for both diagonalization and dynamical simulations. The latter focuses on the process of fusion of the vortex zero-energy modes with the Majorana fermions attached to the defect. This process simulates fusion of non-abelian Ising anyons.

DOI
10.1021/acs.jpca.6b00149

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The Kitaev honeycomb lattice system is an important model of topological materials whose phase diagram exhibits both abelian and non-abelian topological phases. The latter, a so-called Ising phase, is related to topological superconductors. Its quasiparticle excitations, which are formed by Majorana fermions attached to vortices, show non-abelian fractional statistics and are known as Ising anyons. We investigate dislocation defects in the Ising phase of the Kitaev honeycomb model. After introducing them to the system, we accordingly generalize our solution of this model to the situation with the defects. The important part of this effort is developing an appropriate Jordan-Wigner fermionization procedure. It is expected that the presence of defects manifests itself by the formation of fermionic zero-energy modes around the defect end points. We numerically confirm this expectation and further investigate properties of these modes. The computational potential of our technique is demonstrated for both diagonalization and dynamical simulations. The latter focuses on the process of fusion of the vortex zero-energy modes with the Majorana fermions attached to the defect. This process simulates fusion of non-abelian Ising anyons.
In this chapter, we consider Kitaev's honeycomb lattice model (Kitaev, 2006). This is an analytically tractable spin model that gives rise to quasiparticles with Abelian as well as non-Abelian statistics. Some of its properties are similar to the fractional quantum Hall effect, which has been studied experimentally in great detail even though it evades exact analytical treatment (Moore and Read, 1991). Due to its simplicity, the honeycomb lattice model is likely to be the first topological spin model to be realised in the laboratory, e.g., with optical lattice technology (Micheli et al. , 2006). Understanding its properties can facilitate its physical realisation and can provide a useful insight into the mechanisms underlining topological insulators and the fractional quantum Hall effect. The honeycomb lattice model comprises interacting spin-½ particles arranged on the sites of a honeycomb lattice. It is remarkable that such a simple model can support a rich variety of topological behaviours. For certain values of its couplings, Abelian anyons emerge that behave like the toric code anyons. For another coupling regime, non-Abelian anyons emerge that correspond to the Ising anyons. The latter are manifested as vortex-like configurations of the original spin model that can effectively be described by Majorana fermions. These are fermionic fields that are antiparticles of themselves. They were first introduced in the context of high-energy physics (Majorana, 1937) and become increasingly important in the analysis of solid state phenomena (Wilczek, 2009).
Kitaev's model of spins interacting on a honeycomb lattice describes a quantum spin liquid, where an emergent static Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ gauge field is coupled to Majorana fermions. In the presence of an external magnetic field and for a range of interaction strengths, the system behaves as a gapped, non-Abelian quantum spin liquid. In this phase, the vortex excitations of the emergent Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ gauge field have Majorana zero modes bound to them. Motivated by recent experimental progress in measuring and characterizing real materials that could exhibit spin-liquid behavior, we analytically calculate the dynamical spin structure factor in the non-Abelian phase of the Kitaev's honeycomb model. In particular, we treat the case of quenched disorder in the vortex configurations. Our calculations reveal a peak in the low-energy dynamical structure factor that is a signature of the spin-liquid behavior. We map the effective Hamiltonian to that of a chiral ppp-wave superconductor by using the Jordan-Wigner transformation. Subsequently, we analytically calculate the wave functions of the Majorana zero modes, the energy splitting for finite separation of the vortices and, finally, the dynamical structure factor in presence of quenched disorder.
The Kitaev spin liquid model on honeycomb lattice offers an intriguing feature that encapsulates both Abelian and non-Abelian anyons. Recent studies suggest that the comprehensive phase diagram of possible generalized Kitaev model largely depends on the specific details of the discrete lattice, which somewhat deviates from the traditional understanding of "topological" phases. In this paper, we propose an adapted version of the Kitaev spin liquid model on arbitrary planar lattices. Our revised model recovers the toric code model under certain parameter selections within the Hamiltonian terms. Our research indicates that changes in parameters can initiate the emergence of holes, domain walls, or twist defects. Notably, the twist defect, which presents as a lattice dislocation defect, exhibits non-Abelian braiding statistics upon tuning the coefficients of the Hamiltonian on a standard translationally invariant lattice. Additionally, we illustrate that the creation, movement, and fusion of these defects can be accomplished through natural time evolution by linearly interpolating the static Hamiltonian. These defects demonstrate the Ising anyon fusion rule as anticipated. Our findings hint at possible implementation in actual physical materials owing to a more realistically achievable two-body interaction.
The non-Abelian Berry phase is an essential feature of non-Abelian anyons for the realization of topological quantum computation. This thesis is primarily a study about the numerical calculation of the Berry phase of non-Abelian anyons in the Kitaev honeycomb lattice model. It is also a guide for experimental the realizations of the actual brading process. We give an introduction to the theory of non-Abelian anyons, briefly discussing in what kind of systems they are realized, and their possible use in topological quantum computation. Non-Abelian anyons are studied within the Kitaev honeycomb model where they are realized on the plaquettes of the honeycomb lattice. The Kitaev honeycomb model can be solved exactly by using various fermionization methods. In this thesis, we review a solution based on Jordan-Wigner types of fermions which transform Hamiltonian to a fermionic quadratic form. This kind of fermionization procedure is quite general and can be applied to any trivalent spin lattice models. Moreover, we introduce Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov method to solve general quadratic fermionic Hamiltonian and employ Bloch-Messiah theorem in order to write ground state wave function explicitly. Later, we apply these methods to honeycomb model and study the eigenstates of the model so that we can do the Berry phase calculation. The final chapter explains the details of the numerical calculation of the non-Abelian Berry phase. First, we show how to create and adiabatically move vortices in the honeycomb model. A brief review of the Berry phase is given including some discussion about a numerical approach. Later on Thouless’ representation of the ground state is introduced to calculate the Berry phase. All these theoretical tools are applied to a 4 vortex configuration of the model to calculate the non-Abelian Berry phase of the system on a particular path in the parameter space.
We study the collective states of interacting non-Abelian anyons that emerge in Kitaev's honeycomb lattice model. Vortex–vortex interactions are shown to lead to the lifting of topological degeneracy and the energy is found to exhibit oscillations that are consistent with Majorana fermions being localized at vortex cores. We show how to construct states corresponding to the fusion channel degrees of freedom and obtain the energy gaps characterizing the stability of the topological low-energy spectrum. To study the collective behavior of many vortices, we introduce an effective lattice model of Majorana fermions. We find the necessary conditions for the model to approximate the spectrum of the honeycomb lattice model, and show that bi-partite interactions are responsible for the lifting of degeneracy also in many-vortex systems.
We develop a rigorous and highly accurate technique for the calculation of the Berry phase in systems with a quadratic Hamiltonian within the context of the Kitaev honeycomb lattice model. The method is based on the recently found solution of the model that uses the Jordan–Wigner-type fermionization in an exact effective spin-hardcore boson representation. We specifically simulate the braiding of two non-Abelian vortices (anyons) in a four-vortex system characterized by a twofold degenerate ground state. The result of the braiding is the non-Abelian Berry matrix, which is in excellent agreement with the predictions of the effective field theory. The most precise results of our simulation are characterized by an error of the order of 10−5 or lower.We observe exponential decay of the error with the distance between vortices, studied in the range of one to nine plaquettes. We also study its correlation with the involved energy gaps and provide a preliminary analysis of the relevant adiabaticity conditions. The work allows one to investigate the Berry phase in other lattice models including the Yao–Kivelson model and particularly the square–octagon model. It also opens up the possibility of studying the Berry phase under nonadiabatic and other effects that may constitute important sources of errors in topological quantum computation.