Emergent quantum Majorana metal from a chiral spin liquid

Penghao Zhu, Shi Feng, Kang Wang, Tao Xiang () and Nandini Trivedi ()
Additional contact information
Penghao Zhu: The Ohio State University
Shi Feng: The Ohio State University
Kang Wang: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Tao Xiang: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Nandini Trivedi: The Ohio State University

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract We propose a mechanism to explain the emergence of an intermediate gapless spin liquid phase in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model in an externally applied magnetic field, sandwiched between the well-known gapped chiral spin liquid and the gapped partially polarized phase. We propose that, in moderate fields, π-fluxes nucleate in the ground state and trap Majorana zero modes. As these fluxes proliferate with increasing field, the Majorana zero modes overlap creating an emergent $${{\mathbb{Z}}}_{2}$$ Z 2 quantum Majorana metallic state with a “Fermi surface” at zero energy. We further show that the Majorana spectral function captures the dynamical spin and dimer correlations obtained by the infinite Projected Entangled Pair States method, thereby validating our variational approach.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56789-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-56789-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56789-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().