Nonequilibrium Majorana Dynamics by Quenching a Magnetic Field in Kitaev Spin Liquids

Abstract

The honeycomb Kitaev spin model provides a quantum spin liquid in the ground state, where the spin excitations are fractionalized into itinerant and localized Majorana fermions; the former spectrum has a broad continuum ranging up to a high energy, while the latter has a sharp peak at a low energy. Despite tremendous efforts, it remains elusive to clearly identify these distinct Majorana excitations in experiments. Here we show their manifestation in the time evolution after quenching the magnetic field, by using the time-dependent Majorana mean-field theory for both the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic Kitaev models. We find that the transient spin dynamics from the quantum spin liquid states is qualitatively different from the conventional spin precessions by the quench from the high-field forced-ferromagnetic state. We obtain peculiar time evolutions with distinct time scales, i.e., short-time decay of high-energy components associated with the itinerant Majorana excitations, and long-lived excitations at a low energy by the localized ones. These peculiar behaviors are caused by the energy transfer between the two Majorana quasiparticles after the field quench. Moreover, we find that the Majorana semimetal with the point nodes in equilibrium turns into a Majorana metal with the transient "Fermi surfaces" by the energy transfer. In particular, for the quench from the intermediate-field quantum spin liquid in the antiferromagnetic Kitaev model, the Fermi surfaces change their topology in the time evolution, which is regarded as a dynamical version of the Majorana "Lifshitz transition". Our results unveil that the real-time dynamics provides another route to not only the identification of the fractional Majorana excitations in candidate materials of Kitaev magnets but also unprecedented quantum phases that cannot be stabilized as the equilibrium states.