Generation of chirality and orbital magnetization by Stone-Wales-type lattice defects in the Kitaev spin liquid
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866911639264034816 |
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| author | Seth, Arnab Borhani, Fay Kimchi, Itamar |
| author_facet | Seth, Arnab Borhani, Fay Kimchi, Itamar |
| contents | In this work we extend our study of the effect of certain crystallographic defects on the spin-1/2 Kitaev honeycomb spin liquid (arXiv:2511.19409), focusing on its gapless phase and contrasting with the gapped phase. We identify a Stone-Wales (SW) local defect consisting of a 90$^\circ$ bond rotation that preserves Kitaev bond labels for edge-sharing octahedra and thereby enables exact solvability. These SW-type defects involve odd-sided plaquettes with $\pm π/2$ fluxes, but can be created locally. An isolated defect hosts a time-reversal pair of ground-state flux configurations with large net chirality. Certain excitations are also chiral. The chirality manifests in Majorana local Chern marker and in scalar spin chirality, producing electronic orbital magnetization. T-matrix analysis and numerics at finite defect density $n_d$ show that defect chiralities generate a topological gap of $11 n_d$ protecting a Chern number $C=\pm 1$. Emergent ferromagnetic long range Ising interactions $r^{-γ}$ with $2<γ< 3$ between defect chiralities lead to a finite temperature $T_c$ phase transition into the chiral spin liquid. The $T_c$ is proportional to $n_d$ and diverges when $γ\rightarrow 2$. We also consider additional solvable impurity potentials and find that $γ$ can be reduced to below $2.3$ and correspondingly enhance $T_c$. Our results offer applications to 2D Dirac cone systems with a finite density of fluctuating Ising magnetic impurities and to identifying spin liquids with lattice defects. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_13490 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Generation of chirality and orbital magnetization by Stone-Wales-type lattice defects in the Kitaev spin liquid Seth, Arnab Borhani, Fay Kimchi, Itamar Strongly Correlated Electrons Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics In this work we extend our study of the effect of certain crystallographic defects on the spin-1/2 Kitaev honeycomb spin liquid (arXiv:2511.19409), focusing on its gapless phase and contrasting with the gapped phase. We identify a Stone-Wales (SW) local defect consisting of a 90$^\circ$ bond rotation that preserves Kitaev bond labels for edge-sharing octahedra and thereby enables exact solvability. These SW-type defects involve odd-sided plaquettes with $\pm π/2$ fluxes, but can be created locally. An isolated defect hosts a time-reversal pair of ground-state flux configurations with large net chirality. Certain excitations are also chiral. The chirality manifests in Majorana local Chern marker and in scalar spin chirality, producing electronic orbital magnetization. T-matrix analysis and numerics at finite defect density $n_d$ show that defect chiralities generate a topological gap of $11 n_d$ protecting a Chern number $C=\pm 1$. Emergent ferromagnetic long range Ising interactions $r^{-γ}$ with $2<γ< 3$ between defect chiralities lead to a finite temperature $T_c$ phase transition into the chiral spin liquid. The $T_c$ is proportional to $n_d$ and diverges when $γ\rightarrow 2$. We also consider additional solvable impurity potentials and find that $γ$ can be reduced to below $2.3$ and correspondingly enhance $T_c$. Our results offer applications to 2D Dirac cone systems with a finite density of fluctuating Ising magnetic impurities and to identifying spin liquids with lattice defects. |
| title | Generation of chirality and orbital magnetization by Stone-Wales-type lattice defects in the Kitaev spin liquid |
| topic | Strongly Correlated Electrons Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13490 |