Assembling Kitaev honeycomb spin liquids from arrays of one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological phases
Abstract
The Kitaev honeycomb model, which is exactly solvable by virtue of an extensive number of conserved quantities, supports a gapless quantum spin liquid phase as well as gapped descendants relevant for fault-tolerant quantum computation. We show that the anomalous edge modes of one-dimensional (1D) cluster-state-like symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases provide natural building blocks for a variant of the Kitaev model that enjoys only a subextensive number of conserved quantities. The symmetry of our variant allows a single additional nearest-neighbor perturbation, corresponding to an anisotropic version of the Γ term studied in the context of Kitaev materials. We determine the phase diagram of the model using exact diagonalization. Additionally, we use the density matrix renormalization group to show that the underlying 1D SPT building blocks can emerge from a ladder Hamiltonian exhibiting only two-spin interactions supplemented by a Zeeman field. Our approach may provide a pathway toward realizing Kitaev honeycomb spin liquids in spin-orbit-coupled Mott insulators.
Copyright and License
© 2023 American Physical Society.
Acknowledgement
It is a pleasure to acknowledge illuminating conversations with Xie Chen and Gabor Halasz. The U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Science Center supported the construction and numerical analysis of the models studied in this paper. Additional support was provided by the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, the NSF Physics Frontiers Center with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant No. GBMF1250, the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech, National Science Foundation Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958, and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Grant No. 2919.02. D.F.M. was supported by the Israel Science Foundation under Grant No. 2572/21.
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 2469-9969
- United States Department of Energy
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- GBMF1250
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-1748958
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- 2919.02
- Israel Science Foundation
- 2572/21
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter