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Microscopic Spin-1 Parent Hamiltonians for Emergent Valence-Bond Loop Manifolds

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2026-07-14 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We construct an exact spin-11 parent Hamiltonian for constrained valence-bond loop manifolds on the checkerboard and pyrochlore lattices. The Hamiltonian is local, SU(2)- and time-reversal-invariant, and built from positive-semidefinite projectors acting on triangular faces. Each projector removes only the maximally polarized state of a triangle, so the model is frustration-free. Its zero-energy states are generated by an AKLT-like construction in which each spin-11 moment is resolved into two virtual spin-12\tfrac12 degrees of freedom, singlets are formed inside every crossed plaquette or tetrahedron, and the physical spin-11 Hilbert space is recovered by projection. The resulting ground states are fully packed singlet-loop states on the corner-sharing lattice. Thus, a loop or dimer constraint, usually introduced as part of an effective Rokhsar--Kivelson description, appears here as the exact zero-energy manifold of a microscopic spin Hamiltonian. We analyze spin correlations within this manifold and show that, for a fixed loop covering, they are determined by loop connectivity. We also project symmetry-allowed perturbations into the ground-state manifold and derive the resulting low-energy pseudospin dynamics. The checkerboard and pyrochlore cases differ sharply. On the pyrochlore lattice, tetrahedral symmetry removes simple local bias terms, and the leading nontrivial next-nearest-neighbour Heisenberg perturbation gives an emergent spin-12\tfrac12 XY model on the diamond lattice of tetrahedron centers. These results give an exact spin-11 microscopic starting point for constrained valence-bond physics in two and three dimensions, and show how loop, dimer, and gauge-theoretic descriptions can be approached from a small-spin, SU(2)-invariant frustrated magnet.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.12925,
  title  = {Microscopic Spin-1 Parent Hamiltonians for Emergent Valence-Bond Loop Manifolds},
  author = {Hari Borutta and Yasir Iqbal and Kirill Shtengel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12925},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

35 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables