The Electric Field Effects on Kitaev Quantum Spin Liquids

The ground state of 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. Here, we show that Majorana fermions can be manipulated by applying an electric field. By using a combination of exact diagonalization and parton analysis for microscopic spin Hamiltonians, it is demonstrated that the manipulation is most significant near topological phase transitions of Kitaev's quantum spin liquids. We also discuss experimental signatures to detect Kitaev quantum spin liquids in experiments, especially in connection with the candidate materials such as $alpha$-RuCl$_3$.