Thermodynamics of Chiral Spin Liquids with Abelian and Non-Abelian Anyons.

Abstract

Thermodynamic properties of chiral spin liquids are investigated for a variant of the Kitaev model defined on a decorated honeycomb lattice. Using the quantum MonteCarlo simulation, we find that the model exhibits a finite-temperature phase transition associated with the time reversal symmetry breaking, in both topologically trivial and nontrivial regions. Numerical results for the Chern number and the thermal Hall conductivity indicate that the phase transition changes from a continuous to a discontinuous transition as we vary the coupling constants to reach the non-Abelian phase coming from the Abelian phase of the model. In addition, we find as a diagnostic of the chiral spin liquids, successive crossovers with multistage entropy release above the critical temperature, which indicates that the hierarchical fractionalization of a quantum spin occurs differently between the two regions.