Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme

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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 33: Correlated Magnetism – Spin Liquids

TT 33.8: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 19, 2025, 17:00–17:30, H33

Emergent Dynamical Gauge Fields in Generic Kitaev Spin Liquids: From Monolayer to Multilayers — •Aprem Joy and Achim Rosch — Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne

Emergent gauge fields and fractional excitations are long sought-after in modern condensed matter physics. The Kitaev spin liquid and its potential realization in the so called “Kitaev materials" have been at the frontier of this search. The Kitaev spin liquid realizes an emergent static Z2 gauge field with vison excitations strongly interacting with Majorana fermions, by virtue of its gauge flux. While static in the idealized Kitaev model, single visons and vison pairs become dynamical degrees of freedom in the presence of perturbations. We develop a concise theory of the universal properties of single visons in weakly perturbed Kitaev models. We focus both on single-layer and multi-layer systems, motivated by the layered structure of materials. When Kitaev models are stacked on top of each other, weakly coupled by Heisenberg interaction, a rich zoo of mobile gauge excitations emerge whose dynamics is strongly constrained by topology and residual conservation laws, resulting in sub-dimensional mobilities, reminiscent of fractons. Furthermore, we show how vison dynamics in Kitaev materials can lead to novel signatures in relaxation experiments.

[1] A. Joy and A. Rosch, Phys. Rev. X 12, 041004 (2022);

[2] A. Joy and A. Rosch, npj Quantum Mater. 9, 62 (2024).

Keywords: Fractionalization; emergent gauge fields; quantum dynamics; frustrated magnetism