2025/08/28 by Chuan Chen, Chen, Chuan, Inti Sodemann Villadiego +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.21129
openalex publication_date 2025/08/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the dispersions of anyon quasi-particles in the Kitaev honeycomb spin-liquid perturbed by Γ and Γ' couplings in order to understand phase transitions into competing states through anyon gap-closing instabilities. We demonstrate how anyon gap closings allow to understand phase transitions into a plethora of previously identified competing phases -- including zigzag, stripy, 120^∘, and incommensurate spiral phases -- and are in agreement with numerical studies not only on the nature of the phases, but also on the specific critical values of Γ and Γ' couplings. Remarkably, when the anti-ferromagnetic Kitaev model is perturbed by an ferromagnetic Γ interaction, we find that the single-vison and fermion gaps remain open while the gap of a magnon-like local boson vanishes, implying that the resulting state has coexistence of a spontaneous broken symmetry and the fractionalization pattern of the Kitaev spin liquid. The magnetic long-range order could be either a stripy antiferromagnet or an incommensurate spiral, depending on the sign of Γ'.