TY - JOUR T1 - Kitaev honeycomb and other exotic spin models with polar molecules JF - Molecular Physics Y1 - 2013 A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Kaden R. A. Hazzard A1 - Ana Maria Rey AB - We show that ultracold polar molecules pinned in an optical lattice can be used to access a variety of exotic spin models, including the Kitaev honeycomb model. Treating each molecule as a rigid rotor, we use DC electric and microwave fields to define superpositions of rotational levels as effective spin degrees of freedom, while dipole-dipole interactions give rise to interactions between the spins. In particular, we show that, with sufficient microwave control, the interaction between two spins can be written as a sum of five independently controllable Hamiltonian terms proportional to the five rank-2 spherical harmonics Y_{2,q}(theta,phi), where (theta,phi) are the spherical coordinates of the vector connecting the two molecules. To demonstrate the potential of this approach beyond the simplest examples studied in [S. R. Manmana et al., arXiv:1210.5518v2], we focus on the realization of the Kitaev honeycomb model, which can support exotic non-Abelian anyonic excitations. We also discuss the possibility of generating spin Hamiltonians with arbitrary spin S, including those exhibiting SU(N=2S+1) symmetry. VL - 111 U4 - 1908 - 1916 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.5636v1 CP - 12-13 J1 - Molecular Physics U5 - 10.1080/00268976.2013.800604 ER -