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arXiv:0905.3257 · Physical Review B

Parent Hamiltonian for the chiral spin liquid

Ronny Thomale, Eliot Kapit, Darrell F. Schroeter, Martin Greiter

Published Sep 8, 2009• 78 citations
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Abstract

We present a method for constructing parent Hamiltonians for the chiral spin liquid. We find two distinct Hamiltonians for which the chiral spin liquid on a square lattice is an exact zero-energy ground state. We diagonalize both Hamiltonians numerically for 16-site lattices, and find that the chiral spin liquid, modulo its twofold topological degeneracy, is indeed the unique ground state for one Hamiltonian, while it is not unique for the other.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.80.104406

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We present a method for constructing parent Hamiltonians for the chiral spin liquid. We find two distinct Hamiltonians for which the chiral spin liquid on a square lattice is an exact zero-energy ground state. We diagonalize both Hamiltonians numerically for 16-site lattices, and find that the chiral spin liquid, modulo its twofold topological degeneracy, is indeed the unique ground state for one Hamiltonian, while it is not unique for the other.
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We describe a coupled-chain construction for chiral spin liquids in two-dimensional spin systems. Starting from a one-dimensional zigzag spin chain and imposing SU(2) symmetry in the framework of non-Abelian bosonization, we first show that our approach faithfully describes the low-energy physics of an exactly solvable model with a three-spin interaction. Generalizing the construction to the two-dimensional case, we obtain a theory that incorporates the universal properties of the chiral spin liquid predicted by Kalmeyer and Laughlin: charge-neutral edge states, gapped spin-1/2 bulk excitations, and ground-state degeneracy on the torus signaling the topological order of this quantum state. In addition, we show that the chiral spin liquid phase is more easily stabilized in frustrated lattices containing corner-sharing triangles, such as the extended kagome lattice, than in the triangular lattice. Our field-theoretical approach invites generalizations to more exotic chiral spin liquids and may be used to assess the existence of the chiral spin liquid as the ground state of specific lattice systems.
We describe a coupled-chain construction for chiral spin liquids in two-dimensional spin systems. Starting from a one-dimensional zigzag spin chain and imposing SU(2) symmetry in the framework of non-Abelian bosonization, we first show that our approach faithfully describes the low-energy physics of an exactly solvable model with a three-spin interaction. Generalizing the construction to the two-dimensional case, we obtain a theory that incorporates the universal properties of the chiral spin liquid predicted by Kalmeyer and Laughlin: charge-neutral edge states, gapped spin-1/2 bulk excitations, and ground state degeneracy on the torus signalling the topological order of this quantum state. In addition, we show that the chiral spin liquid phase is more easily stabilized in frustrated lattices containing corner-sharing triangles, such as the extended kagome lattice, than in the triangular lattice. Our field theoretical approach invites generalizations to more exotic chiral spin liquids and may be used to assess the existence of the chiral spin liquid as the ground state of specific lattice systems.
Quantum circuits have been shown to be a fertile ground for realizing long-range entangled phases of matter. While various quantum double models with non-chiral topological order have been theoretically investigated and experimentally implemented, the realization and characterization of chiral topological phases have remained less explored. Here we show that chiral topological phases in spin systems, i.e., chiral spin liquids, can be prepared in quantum circuits using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) framework. On top of the VQE ground state, signatures of the chiral topological order are revealed using the recently proposed tangent space excitation ansatz for quantum circuits. We show that, both topological ground state degeneracy and the chiral edge mode can be faithfully captured by this approach. We demonstrate our approach using the Kitaev honeycomb model, finding excellent agreement of low-energy excitation spectrum on quantum circuits with exact solution in all topological sectors. Further applying this approach to a non-exactly solvable chiral spin liquid model on square lattice, the results suggest this approach works well even when the topological sectors are not exactly known.
We construct a parent Hamiltonian for the family of non-Abelian chiral spin liquids proposed recently by two of us [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 207203 (2009)] which includes the Abelian chiral spin liquid proposed by Kalmeyer and Laughlin as the special case s=12s=\frac{1}{2}s=21​. As we use a circular disk geometry with an open boundary, both the annihilation operators we identify and the Hamiltonians we construct from these are exact only in the thermodynamic limit.