Majorana liquids: the complete fractionalization of the electron.
We describe ground states of correlated electron systems in which the electron fractionalizes into separate quasiparticles which carry its spin and its charge, and into real Majorana fermions which carry its Fermi statistics. Such parent states provide a unified theory of previously studied fractionalized states: their descendants include insulating and conducting states with neutral spin S=1/2 fermionic spinons, and states with spinless fermionic charge carriers. We illustrate these ideas on the honeycomb lattice, with field theories of such states and their phase transitions.
Xu
Cenke
C
Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Sachdev
Subir
S