Chiral Spin Liquid Instability of the Kitaev Honeycomb Model with Crystallographic Defects

We study the spin-1/2 Kitaev honeycomb gapless spin liquid in the presence of Stone-Wales-type local lattice defects with odd-sided plaquettes. While the clean Kitaev model has no finite-temperature phase transitions, we find that introducing a finite defect density n_{d}≈10^{-4}-10^{-2} produces a true phase transition with a sizeable T_{c}≈2n_{d} in units of the Kitaev exchange. The resulting non-Abelian chiral quantum spin liquid exhibits scalar spin chirality and electron orbital magnetization which peak near lattice defects. This disorder-driven instability relies on an emergent long range ferromagnetic interaction r^{-γ} (γ≈2.7) between defect chiralities, mediated by the nearly gapless fermions, with implications for topology generation in Dirac cones with fluctuating mass terms.