Unveiling the Phase Diagram and Nonlinear Optical Responses of a Twisted Kitaev Chain

Abstract

Detecting Kitaev interactions in real materials remains challenge, as conventional experimental techniques often have difficulty distinguishing fractionalized excitations from other normal contributions. Terahertz two-dimensional coherent spectroscopy (2DCS) offers a novel approach for probing many-body phenomena, such as exotic excitations in quantum magnets. Motivated by recent experiments on CoNb$_2$O$_6$ and the development of the terahertz spectroscopy in Kitaev quantum spin liquid, we proposed a twisted Kitaev model for CoNb$_2$O$_6$ and determined the precise twist angle according to experimental specific-heat phase diagram. With this calibrated model, we found that non-rephasing diagonal and rephasing anti-diagonal signals appear in the 2DCS nonlinear response. The $x$ and $y$ components of the spin superexchange interactions split the rephasing signals into a grid of discrete peaks. We further demonstrate that the diagonal and the discrete rephasing signals primarily originate from two-spinon and four-spinon excitation processes based on numerical projection method. These findings indicate that even weak Kitaev interactions in quantum materials can be effectively detected via two-dimensional coherent spectroscopy .