English

Gapless chiral spin liquid in a kagome Heisenberg model

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2016-02-05 v4 Other Condensed Matter

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on the Heisenberg S=1/2 quantum spin liquid candidate material kapellasite, we classify all possible chiral (time-reversal symmetry breaking) spin liquids with fermionic spinons on the kagome lattice. We obtain the phase diagram for the physically relevant extended Heisenberg model, comparing the energies of a wide range of microscopic variational wave functions. We propose that, at low temperature, kapellasite exhibits a gapless chiral spin liquid phase with spinon Fermi surfaces. This two-dimensional state inherits many properties of the nearby one-dimensional phase of decoupled anti-ferromagnetic spin chains, but also shows some remarkable differences. We discuss the spin structure factors and other physical properties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.1622,
  title  = {Gapless chiral spin liquid in a kagome Heisenberg model},
  author = {Samuel Bieri and Laura Messio and Bernard Bernu and Claire Lhuillier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.1622},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

5+6 pages, 7 figs; refs added, typos corrected; discussion and refs updated, minor corrections; replaced w. published version