We study the consequences of disorder in the Kitaev honeycomb model, considering both site dilution and exchange randomness. We show that a single vacancy binds a flux and induces a local moment. This moment is polarised by an applied field h: in the gapless phase, for small h the local susceptibility diverges as χ(h)∼(1/h); for a pair of nearby vacancies on the same sublattice, this even increases to χ(h)∼1/(h[(1/h)]^3/2). By contrast, weak exchange randomness does not qualitatively alter the

more »

... usceptibility but has its signature in the heat capacity, which in the gapless phase is power law in temperature with an exponent dependent on disorder strength.