Engineering the Kitaev Spin Liquid in a Quantum Dot System

The Kitaev model on a honeycomb lattice may provide a robust topological quantum memory platform, but finding a material that realizes the unique spin-liquid phase remains a considerable challenge. We demonstrate that an effective Kitaev Hamiltonian can arise from a half-filled Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonian where each site can experience a magnetic field in a different direction. As such, we provide a method for realizing the Kitaev spin liquid on a single hexagonal plaquette made up of 12 quantum dots. Despite the small system size, there are clear signatures of the Kitaev spin-liquid ground state, and there is a range of parameters where these signatures are predicted, allowing a potential platform where Kitaev spin-liquid physics can be explored experimentally in quantum dot plaquettes.