Pristine Mott Insulator from an Exactly Solvable Spin-1/2 Kitaev Model

Abstract: We propose an exactly solvable quantum spin-1/2 model with time reversal invariance on a two dimensional brick-wall lattice, where each unit cell consists of three sites. We find that the ground states are algebraic quantum spin liquid states. The spinon excitations are gapless and the energy dispersion is linear around two Dirac points. The ground states are of three-fold topological degeneracy on a torus. Breaking the time reversal symmetry opens a bulk energy gap and the $Z_2$ vortices obey non-Abelian statistics.