The Effects of the Strain on Kitaev Quantum Spin Liquids

The ground state of isotropic Kitaev's honeycomb model is a non-abelian chiral spin-liquid state with Majorana fermion excitations, which has been proposed as a promising platform for fault-tolerant topological quantum computations. The interaction with deformations of the crystal lattice is a crucial ingredient in many experiments realizing quantum information processing schemes. Here, we construct the symmetry-allowed Hamiltonian with strains on the Honeycomb lattice. Using general symmetry analysis with perturbation for microscopic spin Hamiltonians, we uncover the effects of the strain on Kitaev's quantum Spin Liquids, including strain-induced topological phase transitions.