English

Phonon renormalization in the Kitaev quantum spin liquid

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2020-01-15 v1

Abstract

We study the self-energy of phonons, magnetoelastically coupled to the two-dimensional Kitaev spin-model on the honeycomb lattice. Fractionalization of magnetic moments into mobile Majorana matter and a static Z2\mathbb{Z}_{2} gauge field lead to a continuum of relaxation processes comprising two channels. Thermal flux excitations, which act as an emergent disorder, strongly affect the phonon renormalization. Above the flux proliferation temperature, the dispersion of a narrow quasiparticle-hole channel is suppressed in favor of broad and only weakly momentum dependent features, covering large spectral ranges. Our analysis is based on complementary calculations in the low-temperature homogeneous gauge and a mean-field treatment of thermal gauge fluctuations, valid at intermediate and high temperatures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.09360,
  title  = {Phonon renormalization in the Kitaev quantum spin liquid},
  author = {Alexandros Metavitsiadis and Wolfram Brenig},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.09360},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:21:03.515Z