Cassella G, d'Ornellas P, Hodson T, Natori W M H, Knolle J
Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Institut Laue-Langevin, BP 156, 41 Avenue des Martyrs, 38042, Grenoble Cedex 9, France.
Nat Commun. 2023 Oct 20;14(1):6663. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-42105-9.
Topological insulator phases of non-interacting particles have been generalized from periodic crystals to amorphous lattices, which raises the question whether topologically ordered quantum many-body phases may similarly exist in amorphous systems? Here we construct a soluble chiral amorphous quantum spin liquid by extending the Kitaev honeycomb model to random lattices with fixed coordination number three. The model retains its exact solubility but the presence of plaquettes with an odd number of sides leads to a spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry. We unearth a rich phase diagram displaying Abelian as well as a non-Abelian quantum spin liquid phases with a remarkably simple ground state flux pattern. Furthermore, we show that the system undergoes a finite-temperature phase transition to a conducting thermal metal state and discuss possible experimental realisations.
非相互作用粒子的拓扑绝缘体相已从周期性晶体推广到非晶晶格,这就引出了一个问题:拓扑有序的量子多体相是否同样可能存在于非晶系统中?在这里,我们通过将 Kitaev 蜂窝模型扩展到具有固定配位数为三的随机晶格,构建了一种可解的手性非晶量子自旋液体。该模型保留了其精确可解性,但存在奇数边的面元会导致时间反演对称性的自发破缺。我们揭示了一个丰富的相图,展示了具有非常简单的基态磁通模式的阿贝尔以及非阿贝尔量子自旋液体相。此外,我们表明该系统经历有限温度相变到导电热金属态,并讨论了可能的实验实现。