SU(4)-symmetric spin-orbital liquids on the hyperhoneycomb lattice
Abstract
We study the effective spin-orbital model that describes the magnetism of 4 or 5 Mott insulators in ideal tricoordinated lattices. In the limit of vanishing Hund's coupling, the model has an emergent SU(4) symmetry which is made explicit by means of a Klein transformation on pseudospin degrees of freedom. Taking the hyperhoneycomb lattice as an example, we employ parton constructions with fermionic representations of the pseudospin operators to investigate possible quantum spin-orbital liquid states. We then use variational Monte Carlo (VMC) methods to compute the energies of the projected wave functions. Our numerical results show that the lowest-energy quantum liquid corresponds to a zero-flux state with a Fermi surface of four-color fermionic partons. In spite of the Fermi surface, we demonstrate that this state is stable against tetramerization. A combination of linear flavor wave theory and VMC applied to the complete microscopic model also shows that this liquid state is stable against the formation of collinear long-range order.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1802.00044,
title = {SU(4)-symmetric spin-orbital liquids on the hyperhoneycomb lattice},
author = {Willian M. H. Natori and Eric C. Andrade and Rodrigo G. Pereira},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.00044},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
15 pages,11 figures. The updated version includes two corrections: the inclusion of neglected terms on the complete model (Eqs. (17)-(20)) and the assignment of the sublattices for the Klein transformation (this was presupposed in the first version, but incorrectly assigned). The stability of the QSOL was studied using a combination of LFWT and VMC