Thermal Transport in a one-dimensional Z$_{2}$ Spin Liquid

Abstract

We study the dynamical thermal conductivity of the Kitaev spin model on a two-leg ladder. In contrast to conventional integrable one-dimensional spin systems, we show that heat transport is completely dissipative. This is a direct consequence of fractionalization of spins into mobile Majorana matter and a static $Z_{2}$ gauge field, which acts as an emergent thermally activated disorder. Our finding rests on three complementary calculations of the current correlation function, comprising a phenomenological mean-field treatment of thermal gauge fluctuations, a complete summation over all gauge sectors, as well as exact diagonalization of the original spin model. The results will also be contrasted against the conductivity discarding gauge fluctuations.