English

Chiral spin liquid with spinon Fermi surfaces in spin-$1/2$ triangular Heisenberg model

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2019-12-25 v2

Abstract

We study the interplay of competing interactions in spin-1/21/2 triangular Heisenberg model through tuning the first- (J1J_1), second- (J2J_2), and third-neighbor (J3J_3) couplings. Based on large-scale density matrix renormalization group calculation, we identify a quantum phase diagram of the system and discover a new {\it gapless} chiral spin liquid (CSL) phase in the intermediate J2J_2 and J3J_3 regime. This CSL state spontaneously breaks time-reversal symmetry with finite scalar chiral order, and it has gapless excitations implied by a vanishing spin triplet gap and a finite central charge on the cylinder. Moreover, the central charge grows rapidly with the cylinder circumference, indicating emergent spinon Fermi surfaces. To understand the numerical results we propose a parton mean-field spin liquid state, the U(1)U(1) staggered flux state, which breaks time-reversal symmetry with chiral edge modes by adding a Chern insulator mass to Dirac spinons in the U(1)U(1) Dirac spin liquid. This state also breaks lattice rotational symmetries and possesses two spinon Fermi surfaces driven by nonzero J2J_2 and J3J_3, which naturally explains the numerical results. To our knowledge, this is the first example of a gapless CSL state with coexisting spinon Fermi surfaces and chiral edge states, demonstrating the rich family of novel phases emergent from competing interactions in triangular-lattice magnets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.11560,
  title  = {Chiral spin liquid with spinon Fermi surfaces in spin-$1/2$ triangular Heisenberg model},
  author = {Shou-Shu Gong and Wayne Zheng and Mac Lee and Yuan-Ming Lu and D. N. Sheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.11560},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures, with Supplemental Material