Intermediate gapless phase and topological phase transition of Kitaev model in a uniform magnetic field

Abstract

We study the Kitaev spin liquid (KSL) in a [001] magnetic field employing the mean field theory (MFT/MF) in the Majorana fermion representation. The MF Hamiltonian of the system has the Bogoliubov de-Gennes (BdG) form of a 2D Weyl superconductor. We discover a robust gapless regime in intermediate magnetic field for both gapless and gapped AFM KSL with Jx = Jy before the system is polarized in high magnetic field. A topological phase transition (PT) connecting two gapless phases with nodal lines takes place at a critical magnetic field hc1 in this regime. While the nodal lines at hc1 is protected by the mirror symmetry with Jx = Jy and disappear at Jx 6= Jy with a gap opening near the critical field, the nodal points at E = 0 can exist at intermediate fields even without mirror symmetry. We reveal that the phase evolution of the KSL in the magnetic field is driven by the competition between the magnetic field and the particle-hole (p-h) asymmetry of the normal state of the BdG Hamiltonian, which results in the robust intermediate gapless phase for AFM KSL. For FM KSL, there is no intermediate PT before polarization. The above phase diagrams are confirmed by dynamical MFT (DMFT) results.