3 years ago

# Correlated spin liquids in the quantum kagome antiferromagnet at finite field: a renormalisation group analysis.

Santanu Pal, Anirban Mukherjee, Siddhartha Lal

We analyse the antiferromagnetic spin-$1/2$ XXZ model on the kagome lattice at finite external magnetic field with the help of a nonperturbative zero-temperature renormalization group (RG) technique. Following the work of Kumar \emph{et al} (Phys. Rev. B {\bf 90}, 174409 (2014)), we use a Jordan-Wigner transformation to map the spin problem into one of spinless fermions (spinons) in the presence of a statistical gauge field, and with nearest-neighbour interactions. While the work of Kumar \emph{et al} was confined mostly to the plateau at $1/3$-filling (magnetisation per site) in the XY regime, we analyse the role of inter-spinon interactions in shaping the phases around this plateau in the entire XXZ model. The RG phase diagram obtained contains three spin liquid phases whose position is determined as a function of the exchange anisotropy and the energy scale for fluctuations arising from spinon scattering. Two of these spins liquids are topologically ordered states of matter with gapped, degenerate states on the torus. The gap for one of these phases corresponds to the one-spinon band gap of the Azbel-Hofstadter spectrum for the XY part of the Hamiltonian, while the other arises from two-spinon interactions. The Heisenberg point of this problem is found to lie within the interaction gapped spin liquid phase, in broad agreement with a recent experimental finding. The third phase is an algebraic spin liquid with a gapless Dirac spectrum for spinon excitations, and possess properties that show departures from the Fermi liquid paradigm. The three phase boundaries correspond to critical theories, and meet at a $SU(2)$-symmetric multicritical point. This special critical point agrees well with the gap-closing transition point predicted by Kumar \emph{et al}. We discuss the relevance of our findings to various recent experiments, as well as results obtained from other theoretical analyses.

Publisher URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1811.05222

DOI: arXiv:1811.05222v1

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.