Fermionic magnons, non-Abelian spinons, and spin quantum Hall effect from an exactly solvable Kitaev Hamiltonian with SU(2) symmetry

TL;DR

This paper introduces an exactly solvable SU(2) symmetric Kitaev model revealing exotic spin excitations, non-Abelian anyons, and a spin quantum Hall effect, advancing understanding of topological quantum spin liquids.

Contribution

It presents a new exactly solvable SU(2) symmetric Kitaev model with non-Abelian spin liquid phases and topological field theories, expanding the theoretical framework of quantum spin liquids.

Findings

Existence of fermionic spin-1 excitations in the ground state.

Non-Abelian vortex excitations with spin-1/2 quantum number.

Quantized spin Hall conductivity /2

Abstract

We introduce an exactly solvable SU(2) symmetric Kitaev model with exotic spin excitations. With time reversal symmetry (TRS), the ground state is a spin liquid with gapless or gapped spin-1 but fermionic excitations. When TRS is broken, the resulting spin liquid exhibits deconfined vortex excitations which carry spin-1/2 quantum number and obey non-Abelian statistics. We show that this SU(2) invariant non-Abelian spin liquid exhibits spin quantum Hall effect with quantized spin Hall conductivity \sigma^s_{xy}=\hbar/2\pi, and that the spin response is effectively described the SO(3) level-1 Chern-Simons theory at low energy. We further propose that a SU(2) level-2 Chern-Simons theory is the effective field theory describing the topological structure of the non-Abelian SU(2) invariant spin liquid.