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Controlled buildup of half-quantized thermal conductance in an engineered chiral spin liquid platform

Bo-Ye Sun1,*, Baptiste Bermond2, Lucila Peralta Gavensky3,4, Marin Bukov5, Zheng-Wei Zhou6, and Nathan Goldman2,3,4

  • *Contact author: boyesun@ytu.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023226 – Published 29 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/wbvr-9z8t

Abstract

We study thermal transport along the edge of a small chiral spin liquid device coupled to two Ising-chain reservoirs, a platform suitable for quantum-engineered systems. Adiabatically switching on the tunnel couplings to the reservoirs generates a thermal current that dynamically builds up and reaches a quasi-steady-state regime. In this experimentally critical time window, the two-terminal thermal conductance can approach half-quantized values—a hallmark of Majorana-mediated transport—under finely tuned conditions. The results agree with an effective Landauer-Büttiker description in the large-reservoir limit, where energy-resolved transmission rates help identify the optimal parameters to achieve the half-quantized conductance. This work provides a controllable platform to investigate topological thermal transport in engineered spin systems, such as realized in cold-atom and Rydberg-atom settings.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023226– Published 29 May, 2026
  • Received 9 September 2025
  • Revised 10 February 2026
  • Accepted 15 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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