Fiona Burnell, Oxford
The slave fermion approach has been applied to study magnetism in a range of contexts, from its inception in the study of high Tc to more recent experimental evidence for quantum spin liquids, such as κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu2(CN)3. Here I will use this approach to study a solvable model of anisotropic magnetism on the honeycomb lattice introduced by Kitaev. The slave fermion approach exactly captures the physics of the exact solution, and leads to a different interpretation of the phases of the model, in terms of possible phases of a spin-triplet superconductor.