Haldane-Hubbard Mott Insulator: From Tetrahedral Spin Crystal to Chiral Spin Liquid
Abstract
Motivated by cold atom experiments on Chern insulators, we study the honeycomb lattice Haldane-Hubbard Mott insulator of spin- fermions using exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods. We show that this model exhibits various chiral magnetic orders including a wide regime of triple-Q tetrahedral order. Incorporating third-neighbor hopping frustrates and ultimately melts this tetrahedral spin crystal. From analyzing low energy spectra, many-body Chern numbers, entanglement spectra, and modular matrices, we identify the molten state as a chiral spin liquid (CSL) with gapped semion excitations. We formulate and study the Chern-Simons-Higgs field theory of the exotic CSL-to-tetrahedral spin crystallization transition.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1509.08461,
title = {Haldane-Hubbard Mott Insulator: From Tetrahedral Spin Crystal to Chiral Spin Liquid},
author = {Ciarán Hickey and Lukasz Cincio and Zlatko Papić and Arun Paramekanti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.08461},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
4 pages, Supplemental Material (3 pages). Revised following referee comments. Published version