Analytic calculation of the vison gap in the Kitaev spin liquid

Abstract

Although the ground-state energy of the Kitaev spin liquid can be calculated exactly, the associated vison gap energy has to date only been calculated numerically from finite size diagonalization. Here we show that the phase shift for scattering Majorana fermions off a single bond flip can be calculated analytically, leading to a closed-form expression for the vison gap energy $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=0.2633J$. Generalizations of our approach can be applied to Kitaev spin liquids on more complex lattices such as the three-dimensional hyperoctagonal lattice.