Nature of visons in the perturbed ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Kitaev honeycomb models

Abstract

The Kitaev honeycomb model features emergent anyons in the form of a Majorana fermion and a non-Abelian excitation known as the vison. While visons are static in the ideal model, certain perturbations can induce their motion. Here, it is demonstrated that the vison dynamics induced by Zeeman perturbations are sharply distinct in the ferromagnetic versus the antiferromagnetic model. Namely, in the ferromagnetic model the vison has a trivial translational symmetry and zero Berry curvature, whereas in the antiferromagnetic model it experiences a $\ensuremath{\pi}$ flux per unit cell and has two bands with opposite Chern numbers, leading to an intrinsic contribution to the thermal Hall effect.

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