2019/11/18 by Hyun-Yong Lee, Naoki Kawashima, Yong Baek Kim
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Degenerate energy levels #MAJORANA #Quantum #Quantum entanglement #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum spin liquid #Spin (aerodynamics) #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological quantum computer #Toric code #Wave function #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevresearch.2.033318
published as Phys. Rev. Research 2, 033318 (2020)
arxiv created 2019/11/18 · openalex created_date 2019/12/05 · openalex publication_date 2020/08/27 · arxiv updated 2020/08/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The spin-1/2 Kitaev model offers the exactly solvable example of quantum spin liquids. Possible material realizations of the spin-1/2 Kitaev systems and the prospect of using the Majorana fermion excitations for quantum computations have revolutionized quantum spin liquids research. Recently it has been suggested that higher-spin, especially spin-1, Kitaev exchange interactions can be realized in a variety of materials. Numerical computations on small clusters indicate that the ground state of the spin-1 Kitaev model may also be a quantum spin liquid. On the other hand, the nature of the ground state remains elusive since the spin-1 model is not exactly solvable in contrast to the spin-1/2 model. In this work, using the quantum-entanglement based tensor network approach, we construct an explicit ground-state wave function for the spin-1 Kitaev model, which is written only in terms of physical spin operators. We establish the existence of distinct topological sectors on a torus by constructing the minimally entangled states in the degenerate ground-state manifold and evaluating topological entanglement entropy. Our results suggest that the ground state of the spin-1 Kitaev model is a gapped quantum spin liquid with Z 2 gauge structure and Abelian quasiparticles. We explain the subtle differences between the spin-1/2 and spin-1 Kitaev quantum spin liquids.