Generation of chirality and orbital magnetization by Stone-Wales-type lattice defects in the Kitaev spin liquid

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Authors: Arnab Seth, Fay Borhani, Itamar Kimchi
Cited by: 0
References: 68

Abstract

In this work we extend our study of the effect of certain crystallographic defects on the spin-1/2 Kitaev honeycomb spin liquid (arXiv:2511.19409), focusing on its gapless phase and contrasting with the gapped phase. We identify a Stone-Wales (SW) local defect consisting of a 90$^\circ$ bond rotation that preserves Kitaev bond labels for edge-sharing octahedra and thereby enables exact solvability. These SW-type defects involve odd-sided plaquettes with $\pm π/2$ fluxes, but can be created locally. An isolated defect hosts a time-reversal pair of ground-state flux configurations with large net chirality. Certain excitations are also chiral. The chirality manifests in Majorana local Chern marker and in scalar spin chirality, producing electronic orbital magnetization. T-matrix analysis and numerics at finite defect density $n_d$ show that defect chiralities generate a topological gap of $11 n_d$ protecting a Chern number $C=\pm 1$. Emergent ferromagnetic long range Ising interactions $r^{-γ}$ with $2

Fields of Study & Subjects

Advanced Condensed Matter Physics Topological Materials and Phenomena Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism

Publication details

Journal / source
Physical review. B./Physical review. B
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Volume
113
Issue
22
Publication date
20 April 2026
Language
EN