No Arabic abstract
Frustrated spin systems on Kagome lattices have long been considered to be a promising candidate for realizing exotic spin liquid phases. Recently, there has been a lot of renewed interest in these systems with the discovery of materials such as Volborthite and Herbertsmithite that have Kagome like structures. In the presence of an external magnetic field, these frustrated systems can give rise to magnetization plateaus of which the plateau at $m=frac{1}{3}$ is considered to be the most prominent. Here we study the problem of the antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 quantum XXZ Heisenberg model on a Kagome lattice by using a Jordan-Wigner transformation that maps the spins onto a problem of fermions coupled to a Chern-Simons gauge field. This mapping relies on being able to define a consistent Chern-Simons term on the lattice. Using a recently developed method to rigorously extend the Chern-Simons term to the frustrated Kagome lattice we can now formalize the Jordan-Wigner transformation on the Kagome lattice. We then discuss the possible phases that can arise at the mean-field level from this mapping and focus specifically on the case of $frac{1}{3}$-filling ($m=frac{1}{3}$ plateau) and analyze the effects of fluctuations in our theory. We show that in the regime of $XY$ anisotropy the ground state at the $1/3$ plateau is equivalent to a bosonic fractional quantum Hall Laughlin state with filling fraction $1/2$ and that at the $5/9$ plateau it is equivalent to the first bosonic Jain daughter state at filling fraction $2/3$.
We clarify the existence of several magnetization plateaux for the kagome $S=1/2$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model in a magnetic field. Using approximate or exact localized magnon eigenstates, we are able to describe in a similar manner the plateau states that occur for magnetization per site $m=1/3$, $5/9$, and $7/9$ of the saturation value. These results are confirmed using large-scale Exact Diagonalization on lattices up to 63 sites.
The properties of ground state of spin-$frac{1}{2}$ kagome antiferromagnetic Heisenberg (KAFH) model have attracted considerable interest in the past few decades, and recent numerical simulations reported a spin liquid phase. The nature of the spin liquid phase remains unclear. For instance, the interplay between symmetries and $Z_2$ topological order leads to different types of $Z_2$ spin liquid phases. In this paper, we develop a numerical simulation method based on symmetric projected entangled-pair states (PEPS), which is generally applicable to strongly correlated model systems in two spatial dimensions. We then apply this method to study the nature of the ground state of the KAFH model. Our results are consistent with that the ground state is a $U(1)$ Dirac spin liquid rather than a $Z_2$ spin liquid.
We believe that a necessary first step in understanding the ground state properties of the spin-${scriptstylefrac{1}{2}}$ kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet is a better understanding of this models very large number of low energy singlet states. A description of the low energy states that is both accurate and amenable for numerical work may ultimately prove to have greater value than knowing only what these properties are, in particular when these turn on the delicate balance of many small energies. We demonstrate how this program would be implemented using the basis of spin-singlet dimerized states, though other bases that have been proposed may serve the same purpose. The quality of a basis is evaluated by its participation in all the low energy singlets, not just the ground state. From an experimental perspective, and again in light of the small energy scales involved, methods that can deliver all the low energy states promise more robust predictions than methods that only refine a fraction of these states.
We discuss the ground-state degeneracy of spin-$1/2$ kagome-lattice quantum antiferromagnets on magnetization plateaus by employing two complementary methods: the adiabatic flux insertion in closed boundary conditions and a t Hooft anomaly argument on inherent symmetries in a quasi-one-dimensional limit. The flux insertion with a tilted boundary condition restricts the lower bound of the ground-state degeneracy on $1/9$, $1/3$, $5/9$, and $7/9$ magnetization plateaus under the $mathrm{U(1)}$ spin-rotation and the translation symmetries: $3$, $1$, $3$, and $3$, respectively. This result motivates us further to develop an anomaly interpretation of the $1/3$ plateau. Taking advantage of the insensitivity of anomalies to spatial anisotropies, we examine the existence of the unique gapped ground state on the $1/3$ plateau from a quasi-one-dimensional viewpoint. In the quasi-one-dimensional limit, kagome antiferromagnets are reduced to weakly coupled three-leg spin tubes. Here, we point out the following anomaly description of the $1/3$ plateau. While a simple $S=1/2$ three-leg spin tube cannot have the unique gapped ground state on the $1/3$ plateau because of an anomaly between a $mathbb Z_3times mathbb Z_3$ symmetry and the translation symmetry at the $1/3$ filling, the kagome antiferromagnet breaks explicitly one of the $mathbb Z_3$ symmetries related to a $mathbb Z_3$ cyclic transformation of spins in the unit cell. Hence the kagome antiferromagnet can have the unique gapped ground state on the $1/3$ plateau.
We study numerically the spin-1/2 XXZ model in a field on an infinite Kagome lattice. We use different algorithms based on infinite Projected Entangled Pair States (iPEPS) for this, namely: (i) with simplex tensors and 9-site unit cell, and (ii) coarse-graining three spins in the Kagome lattice and mapping it to a square-lattice model with nearest-neighbor interactions, with usual PEPS tensors, 6- and 12-site unit cells. Similarly to our previous calculation at the SU(2)-symmetric point (Heisenberg Hamiltonian), for any anisotropy from the Ising limit to the XY limit, we also observe the emergence of magnetization plateaus as a function of the magnetic field, at $m_z = frac{1}{3}$ using 6- 9- and 12-site PEPS unit cells, and at $m_z = frac{1}{9}, frac{5}{9}$ and $frac{7}{9}$ using a 9-site PEPS unit cell, the later set-up being able to accommodate $sqrt{3} times sqrt{3}$ solid order. We also find that, at $m_z = frac{1}{3}$, (lattice) nematic and $sqrt{3} times sqrt{3}$ VBC-order states are degenerate within the accuracy of the 9-site simplex-method, for all anisotropy. The 6- and 12-site coarse-grained PEPS methods produce almost-degenerate nematic and $1 times 2$ VBC-Solid orders. Within our accuracy, the 6-site coarse-grained PEPS method gives slightly lower energies, which can be explained by the larger amount of entanglement this approach can handle, even when the PEPS unit-cell is not commensurate with the expected ground state. Furthermore, we do not observe chiral spin liquid behaviors at and close to the XY point, as has been recently proposed. Our results are the first tensor network investigations of the XXZ spin chain in a field, and reveal the subtle competition between nearby magnetic orders in numerical simulations of frustrated quantum antiferromagnets, as well as the delicate interplay between energy optimization and symmetry in tensor networks.