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Signatures of gapless fermionic spinons on a strip of the kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet

M-Aghaei, Amir and Bauer, Bela and Shtengel, Kirill and Mishmash, Ryan V. (2018) Signatures of gapless fermionic spinons on a strip of the kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Physical Review B, 98 (5). Art. No. 054430. ISSN 2469-9950. doi:10.1103/physrevb.98.054430. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20180827-094621388

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Abstract

The search for exotic quantum spin liquid states in simple yet realistic spin models remains a central challenge in the field of frustrated quantum magnetism. Here we consider the canonical nearest-neighbor kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet restricted to a quasi-one-dimensional strip consisting entirely of corner-sharing triangles. Using large-scale density matrix renormalization group calculations, we identify in this model an extended gapless quantum phase characterized by central charge c = 2 and power-law decaying spin and bond-energy correlations which oscillate at tunably incommensurate wave vectors. We argue that this intriguing spin liquid phase can be understood as a marginal instability of a two-band spinon Fermi surface coupled to an emergent U(1) gauge field, an interpretation which we substantiate via bosonization analysis and Monte Carlo calculations on model Gutzwiller variational wave functions. Our results represent one of the first numerical demonstrations of emergent fermionic spinons in a simple SU(2) invariant nearest-neighbor Heisenberg model beyond the strictly one-dimensional (Bethe chain) limit.


Item Type:Article
Related URLs:
URLURL TypeDescription
https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.98.054430DOIArticle
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09397arXivDiscussion Paper
ORCID:
AuthorORCID
Bauer, Bela0000-0001-9796-2115
Additional Information:© 2018 American Physical Society. (Received 12 September 2017; revised manuscript received 31 July 2018; published 27 August 2018) We are very grateful to Andreas Läuchli for discussions and for sharing with us his unpublished DMRG results on the same model [41] and also to Olexei Motrunich for many useful discussions on this work. This work was supported by the NSF through Grant No. DMR-1411359 (A.M.A. and K.S.); the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech; and the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center, with the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Group:Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
Funders:
Funding AgencyGrant Number
NSFDMR-1411359
Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, CaltechUNSPECIFIED
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM)UNSPECIFIED
Gordon and Betty Moore FoundationUNSPECIFIED
Issue or Number:5
DOI:10.1103/physrevb.98.054430
Record Number:CaltechAUTHORS:20180827-094621388
Persistent URL:https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20180827-094621388
Usage Policy:No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided.
ID Code:89157
Collection:CaltechAUTHORS
Deposited By: George Porter
Deposited On:27 Aug 2018 20:35
Last Modified:16 Nov 2021 00:33

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