An exact chiral spin liquid with non-Abelian anyons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an exact chiral spin liquid ground state in a modified Kitaev model on a decorated honeycomb lattice, revealing non-Abelian anyons and topological phase transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a new exactly solvable model with a decorated lattice that hosts a chiral spin liquid with non-Abelian anyons, expanding understanding of topological quantum states.

Findings

Existence of an exact chiral spin liquid ground state.

Identification of non-Abelian anyons in the vortex excitations.

Discovery of a quantum critical point separating topologically distinct phases.

Abstract

We establish the existence of a chiral spin liquid (CSL) as the exact ground state of the Kitaev model on a decorated honeycomb lattice, which is obtained by replacing each site in the familiar honeycomb lattice with a triangle. The CSL state spontaneously breaks time reversal symmetry but preserves other symmetries. There are two topologically distinct CSLs separated by a quantum critical point. Interestingly, vortex excitations in the topologically nontrivial (Chern number $\pm 1$) CSL obey non-Abelian statistics.