Creation and Manipulation of Anyons in the Kitaev Model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how local spin operations in the Kitaev honeycomb model generate Abelian anyons and fermionic excitations, providing explicit operators for creating and moving anyons, with implications for experimental detection.

Contribution

It derives explicit multi-spin operators for creating and manipulating Abelian anyons in the Kitaev model, advancing understanding of their experimental realization.

Findings

Local spin operators create Abelian anyons and fermions in the Kitaev model.

Explicit multi-spin operators for anyon manipulation are derived.

Experimental constraints for observing anyons are discussed.

Abstract

We analyze the effect of local spin operators in the Kitaev model on the honeycomb lattice. We show, in perturbation around the isolated-dimer limit, that they create Abelian anyons together with fermionic excitations which are likely to play a role in experiments. We derive the explicit form of the operators creating and moving Abelian anyons without creating fermions and show that it involves multi-spin operations. Finally, the important experimental constraints stemming from our results are discussed.