Topological spin liquids in the ruby lattice with anisotropic Kitaev interactions

Saeed S. Jahromi, Mehdi Kargarian, S. Farhad Masoudi, and Abdollah Langari
Phys. Rev. B 94, 125145 – Published 26 September 2016

Abstract

The ruby lattice is a four-valent lattice interpolating between honeycomb and triangular lattices. In this work we investigate the topological spin-liquid phases of a spin Hamiltonian with Kitaev interactions on the ruby lattice using exact diagonalization and perturbative methods. The latter interactions combined with the structure of the lattice yield a model with Z2×Z2 gauge symmetry. We mapped out the phase diagram of the model and found gapped and gapless spin-liquid phases. While the low-energy sector of the gapped phase corresponds to the well-known topological color code model on a honeycomb lattice, the low-energy sector of the gapless phases is described by an effective spin model with three-body interactions on a triangular lattice. A gap is opened in the spectrum in small magnetic fields, where we showed that the ground state has a finite topological entanglement entropy. We argue that the gapped phases could be possibly described by exotic excitations, and their corresponding spectrum is richer than the Ising phase of the Kitaev model.

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  • Received 31 July 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.125145

©2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Saeed S. Jahromi1,*, Mehdi Kargarian2, S. Farhad Masoudi3, and Abdollah Langari1,4,†

  • 1Department of Physics, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran 14588-89694, Iran
  • 2Condensed Matter Theory Center and Joint Quantum Institute, Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Post Office Box 15875-4416, Tehran, Iran
  • 4Center of Excellence in Complex Systems and Condensed Matter, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran 14588-89694, Iran

  • *jahromi@physics.sharif.edu
  • langari@sharif.edu

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Issue

Vol. 94, Iss. 12 — 15 September 2016

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