Entanglement in 3D Kitaev Spin Liquids

TL;DR

This paper investigates the entanglement spectrum of 3D Kitaev spin liquids, revealing its close relation to topological edge states and its potential as a tool for probing topological properties.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the entanglement spectrum can reveal topological features of 3D Kitaev spin liquids, sometimes more effectively than surface spectra.

Findings

Entanglement spectrum closely relates to topologically protected edge spectrum.

In some cases, entanglement spectrum contains more topological information than surface spectrum.

Provides a simple method to probe the topology of 3D Kitaev spin liquids.

Abstract

Quantum spin liquids are highly fascinating quantum liquids in which the spin degrees of freedom fractionalize. An interesting class of spin liquids are the exactly solvable, three-dimensional Kitaev spin liquids. Their fractionalized excitations are Majonara fermions, which may exhibit a variety of topological band structures --- ranging from topologically protected Weyl semi-metals over nodal semi-metals to systems with Majorana Fermi surfaces. We study the entanglement spectrum of such Kitaev spin liquids and verify that it is closely related to the topologically protected edge spectrum. Moreover, we find that in some cases the entanglement spectrum contains even more information about the topological features than the surface spectrum, and thus provides a simple and reliable tool to probe the topology of a system.