No Arabic abstract
We study the nearest neighbor $XXZ$ Heisenberg quantum antiferromagnet on the kagome lattice. Here we consider the effects of several perturbations: a) a chirality term, b) a Dzyaloshinski-Moriya term, and c) a ring-exchange type term on the bowties of the kagome lattice, and inquire if they can suppport chiral spin liquids as ground states. The method used to study these Hamiltonians is a flux attachment transformation that maps the spins on the lattice to fermions coupled to a Chern-Simons gauge field on the kagome lattice. This transformation requires us to consistently define a Chern-Simons term on the kagome lattice. We find that the chirality term leads to a chiral spin liquid even in the absence of an uniform magnetic field, with an effective spin Hall conductance of $sxy = frac{1}{2}$ in the regime of $XY$ anisotropy. The Dzyaloshinkii-Moriya term also leads a similar chiral spin liquid but only when this term is not too strong. An external magnetic field also has the possibility of giving rise to additional plateaus which also behave like chiral spin liquids in the $XY$ regime. Finally, we consider the effects of a ring-exchange term and find that, provided its coupling constant is large enough, it may trigger a phase transition into a chiral spin liquid by the spontaneous breaking of time-reversal invariance.
We review recent density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) studies of lightly doped quantum spin liquids (QSLs) on the kagome lattice. While a number of distinct conducting phases, including high-temperature superconductivity, have been theoretically anticipated we find instead a tendency toward fractionalized insulating charge-density-wave (CDW) states. In agreement with earlier work (Jiang, Devereaux, and Kivelson, Phys. Rev. Lett. ${bf 119}$, 067002 (2017)), results for the $t$-$J$ model reveal that starting from a fully gapped QSL, light doping leads to CDW long-range order with a pattern that depends on lattice geometry and doping concentration such that there is one doped-hole per CDW unit cell, while the spin-spin correlations remain short-ranged. Alternatively, this state can be viewed as a stripe crystal or Wigner crystal of spinless holons, rather than doped holes. From here, by studying generaliz
We study $S=1$ spin liquid states on the kagome lattice constructed by Gutzwiller-projected $p_x+ip_y$ superconductors. We show that the obtained spin liquids are either non-Abelian or Abelian topological phases, depending on the topology of the fermionic mean-field state. By calculating the modular matrices $S$ and $T$, we confirm that projected topological superconductors are non-Abelian chiral spin liquid (NACSL). The chiral central charge and the spin Hall conductance we obtained agree very well with the $SO(3)_1$ (or, equivalently, $SU(2)_2$) field theory predictions. We propose a local Hamiltonian which may stabilize the NACSL. From a variational study we observe a topological phase transition from the NACSL to the $Z_2$ Abelian spin liquid.
The topological quantum spin liquids (SL) and the nature of quantum phase transitions between them have attracted intensive attentions for the past twenty years. The extended kagome spin-1/2 antiferromagnet emerges as the primary candidate for hosting both time reversal symmetry (TRS) preserving and TRS breaking SLs based on density matrix renormalization group simulations. To uncover the nature of the novel quantum phase transition between the SL states, we study a minimum XY model with the nearest neighbor (NN) ($J_{xy}$), the second and third NN couplings ($J_{2xy}=J_{3xy}=J_{xy}$). We identify the TRS broken chiral SL (CSL) with the turn on of a small perturbation $J_{xy}sim 0.06 J_{xy}$, which is fully characterized by the fractionally quantized topological Chern number and the conformal edge spectrum as the $ u=1/2$ fractional quantum Hall state. On the other hand, the NN XY model ($J_{xy}=0$) is shown to be a critical SL state adjacent to the CSL, characterized by the gapless spin singlet excitations and also vanishing small spin triplet excitations. The quantum phase transition from the CSL to the gapless critical SL is driven by the collapsing of the neutral (spin singlet) excitation gap. By following the evolution of entanglement spectrum, we find that the transition takes place through the coupling of the edge states with opposite chiralities, which merge into the bulk and become gapless neutral excitations. The effect of the NN spin-$z$ coupling $J_z$ is also studied, which leads to a quantum phase diagram with an extended regime for the gapless SL.
Guided by the recent discovery of SU($2$)$_1$ and SU($3$)$_1$ chiral spin liquids on the square lattice, we propose a family of generic time-reversal symmetry breaking SU($N$)-symmetric models, of arbitrary $Nge 2$, in the fundamental representation, with short-range interactions extending at most to triangular units. The evidence for Abelian chiral spin liquid (CSL) phases in such models is obtained via a combination of complementary numerical methods such as exact diagonalizations (ED), infinite density matrix renormalization group (iDMRG) and infinite Projected Entangled Pair State (iPEPS). Extensive ED on small clusters are carried out up to $N=10$, revealing (in some range of the Hamiltonian parameters) a bulk gap and ground-state degeneracy on periodic clusters as well as linear dispersing chiral modes on the edge of open systems, whose level counting is in full agreement with SU($N$)$_1$ Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theory predictions. Using an SU($N$)-symmetric version of iDMRG for $N=2,3$ and $4$ to compute entanglement spectra on (infinitely-long) cylinders in all topological sectors, we provide additional unambiguous signatures of the SU($N$)$_1$ character of the chiral liquids. An SU($4$)-symmetric chiral PEPS is shown to provide a good variational ansatz of the $N=4$ ground state, constructed in a manner similar to its $N=2$ and $N=3$ analogs. The entanglement spectra in all topological sectors of an infinitely long cylinder reveal specific features of the chiral edge modes originating from the PEPS holographic bulk-edge correspondence. Results for the correlation lengths suggest some form of long-range correlations in SU($N$) chiral PEPS, which nevertheless do not preclude an accurate representation of the gapped SU($N$) CSL phases. Finally, we discuss the possible observation of such Abelian CSL in ultracold atom setups.
Using a perturbative renormalization group approach, we show that the extended ($J_1$-$J_2$-$J_d$) Heisenberg model on the kagome lattice with a staggered chiral interaction ($J_chi$) can exhibit a gapless chiral quantum spin liquid phase. Within a coupled-chains construction, this phase can be understood as a chiral sliding Luttinger liquid with algebraic decay of spin correlations along the chain directions. We calculate the low-energy properties of this gapless chiral spin liquid using the effective field theory and show that they are compatible with the predictions from parton mean-field theories with symmetry-protected line Fermi surfaces. These results may be relevant to the state observed in the kapellasite material.