Majorana local density of states and Aharonov–Bohm oscillations from pinned fluxes in the Kitaev spin liquid

We propose and theoretically analyze a local spectroscopic signature of fractionalization in the non-Abelian Kitaev spin liquid using a single scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) tip. Under the electronic inelastic cotunneling mechanism, the derivative of the tunneling conductance is proportional to the on-site dynamical spin-spin correlation function, which maps onto the Majorana local density of states (LDOS) in the static flux background. In the low-energy effective theory, when a π-flux is pinned in the system, the continuum Dirac model predicts a radial quantum-oscillation pattern in the fermionic LDOS that encodes the anyonic Aharonov–Bohm phase. Large-scale exact diagonalization of the Kitaev honeycomb model validates this prediction by contrasting the zero-flux and two-flux sectors: oscillations in both frequency and radial distance appear only in the presence of fluxes, supported by the Dirac theory. These results establish a concrete, local spectroscopic signature of defect-pinned fluxes, providing an experimentally accessible method to identify static fluxes and image Majorana quasiparticles in Kitaev-candidate materials.