Emergent quantum Majorana metal from a chiral spin liquid.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40069197.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-56789-8 and PMC identifier 11897414.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-ND.
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Abstract
We propose a mechanism to explain the emergence of an intermediate gapless spin liquid phase in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model in an externally applied magnetic field, sandwiched between the well-known gapped chiral spin liquid and the gapped partially polarized phase. We propose that, in moderate fields, π-fluxes nucleate in the ground state and trap Majorana zero modes. As these fluxes proliferate with increasing field, the Majorana zero modes overlap creating an emergent <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <msub><mrow><mi>Z</mi></mrow> <mrow><mn>2</mn></mrow> </msub> </math> quantum Majorana metallic state with a "Fermi surface" at zero energy. We further show that the Majorana spectral function captures the dynamical spin and dimer correlations obtained by the infinite Projected Entangled Pair States method, thereby validating our variational approach.