A primer on Kitaev Model: Basic aspects, material realization, and recent experiments

This elementary review article is aimed to the beginning graduate students interested to know basic aspects of Kitaev model. We begin with a very lucid introduction of Kitaev model and present its exact solution, Hilbert space structure, fractionalisation, spin-spin correlation function and topological degeneracy in an elementary way. We then discuss the recent proposal of realizing Kitaev interaction in certain materials. Finally we present some recent experiments done on these materials, mainly magnetization, susceptibility, specific heat and thermal Hall effect to elucidate the recent status of material realization of coveted Kitaev spin-liquid phase. We end with a brief discussion on other theoretical works on Kitaev model from different many-body aspects.