Engineering and probing non-Abelian chiral spin liquids using periodically driven ultracold atoms

TL;DR

This paper proposes a Floquet-driven scheme to realize and detect non-Abelian chiral spin liquids with cold atoms, enabling exploration of Majorana fermions and topological thermal transport in quantum simulators.

Contribution

It introduces a method to implement Kitaev's honeycomb model using periodic driving, opening a topological gap and providing detection techniques for Majorana-related phenomena.

Findings

Floquet drive opens a topological gap without mixing Majorana and vortex states.

Proposed detection via gap spectroscopy and edge quenches reveals chiral edge signals.

Robustness of edge signals suggests feasible experimental observation.

Abstract

We propose a scheme to implement Kitaev's honeycomb model with cold atoms, based on a periodic (Floquet) drive, in view of realizing and probing non-Abelian chiral spin liquids using quantum simulators. We derive the effective Hamiltonian to leading order in the inverse-frequency expansion, and show that the drive opens up a topological gap in the spectrum without mixing the effective Majorana and vortex degrees of freedom. We address the challenge of probing the physics of Majorana fermions, while having only access to the original composite spin degrees of freedom. Specifically, we propose to detect the properties of the chiral spin liquid phase using gap spectroscopy and edge quenches in the presence of the Floquet drive. The resulting chiral edge signal, which relates to the thermal Hall effect associated with neutral Majorana currents, is found to be robust for realistically-prepared states. By combining strong interactions with Floquet engineering, our work paves the way for future studies of non-Abelian excitations and quantized thermal transport using quantum simulators.