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THU: Thursday Contributed Sessions
THU 8: Frustrated Quantum Systems: Contributed Session to Symposium
THU 8.2: Talk
Thursday, September 11, 2025, 14:30–14:45, ZHG009
Majorana Fermi Surface and Transient Localization from Coherent Disorder — •Shi Feng1, Penghao Zhu2, Kang Wang3, Tao Xiang3, Nandini Trivedi2, Michael Knap1, and Johannes Knolle1 — 1Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany — 2The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA — 3Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
We propose a mechanism to explain the emergence of the intermediate gapless spin liquid phase in the Kitaev material under an external magnetic field. In moderate fields, flux-trapped localized Majorana resonances are nucleated in the ground state. As the density of these fluxes increases with field strength, the Majorana modes begin to overlap, leading to the formation of an emergent Z2 quantum Majorana metallic state with a Fermi surface at zero energy. Our analysis shows that the Majorana spectral function obtained by our mean-field approach captures the dynamical spin and dimer correlations computed via infinite projected entangled pair states and density matrix renormalization group methods. The identification of the intermediate gapless phase as a quantum Majorana metal at zero temperature suggests a new class of gapless quantum spin liquids that is complementary to the conventional Dirac spin liquids and U(1) spinon Fermi surface states found in prevailing theories. Based on the picture of a Majorana metal induced by zero-temperature coherent disorders in the emergent gauge field, we further discuss the possibility of transient localization and unconventional transport properties, and comment on potential realization in Rydberg atom array experiments.
Keywords: Quantum Spin Liquid; Kitaev Material; Fractionalization; Topological Order; Frustrated Magnetism