On thermalization in Kitaev's 2D model

The thermalization process of the 2D Kitaev model is studied within the Markovian weak coupling approximation. It is shown that its largest relaxation time is bounded from above by a constant independent of the system size and proportional to exp(2∆/kT) where ∆ is an energy gap over the 4-fold degenerate ground state. This means that the 2D Kitaev model is not an example of a memory, neither quantum nor classical. 1