English

A fractionalised "$\mathbb{Z}_2$" classical Heisenberg spin liquid

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2017-01-30 v1

Abstract

Quantum spin systems are by now known to exhibit a large number of different classes of spin liquid phases. By contrast, for \textit{classical} Heisenberg models, only one kind of fractionalised spin liquid phase, the so-called Coulomb or U(1)U(1) spin liquid, has until recently been identified: this exhibits algebraic spin correlations and impurity moments, `orphan spins', whose size is a fraction of that of the underlying microscopic degrees of freedom. Here, we present two Heisenberg models exhibiting fractionalisation in combination with exponentially decaying correlations. These can be thought of as a classical continuous spin version of a Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 spin liquid. Our work suggests a systematic search and classification of classical spin liquids as a worthwhile endeavour.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.00705,
  title  = {A fractionalised "$\mathbb{Z}_2$" classical Heisenberg spin liquid},
  author = {J. Rehn and Arnab Sen and R. Moessner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.00705},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:09:46.568Z