New opportunities in Kitaev spin liquids

Spin liquids are highly-entangled phases of quantum spins that host fractional excitations. The best-known examples of such states arise in the Kitaev honeycomb model, which is fine-tuned to exhibit extensively-many conserved quantities that permit an exact solution. I will introduce the model and show that including two 'real-world' effects -- vacancies and breaking of integrability -- yield qualitatively different physical properties. Additionally, I will explain how Kitaev spin liquids could be realized with subextensively many conserved quantities by using boundary states of one-dimensional SPTs instead of local spins as building blocks.