We study the zero-temperature phase diagram of a class of two-dimensional SU
(N) antiferromagnets. These models are characterized by having the same type of SU
(N) spin placed at each site of the lattice, and share the property that, in general, more than two spins must be combined to form a singlet. An important motivation to study these systems is that they may be realized naturally in Mott insulators of alkaline-earth atoms placed on optical lattices; indeed, such Mott insulators have already been obtained experimentally, although the temperatures are still high compared to the magnetic exchange energy. We study these antiferromagnets in a large-
N limit, finding a variety of ground states. Some of the models studied here have a valence-bond solid ground state, as was found in prior studies, yet we find that many others have a richer variety of ground states. Focusing on the two-dimensional square lattice, in addition to valence cluster states (which are analogous to valence-bond states), we find both Abelian and non-Abelian chiral spin liquid ground states, which are magnetic counterparts of the fractional quantum Hall effect. We also find a ``doubled'' chiral spin liquid ground state that preserves time-reversal symmetry. These results are based on a combination of rigorous lower bounds on the large-
N ground-state energy and a systematic numerical ground-state search. We conclude by discussing whether experimentally relevant SU
(N) antiferromagnets, away from the large-
N limit, may be chiral spin liquids.
We study a class of
SU(N) Heisenberg models, describing Mott insulators of fermionic ultracold alkaline earth atoms on the three-dimensional simple cubic lattice. Based on an earlier semiclassical analysis, magnetic order is unlikely, and we focus instead on a solvable large-
N limit designed to address the competition among nonmagnetic ground states. We find a rich phase diagram as a function of the filling parameter
k, composed of a variety of ground states spontaneously breaking lattice symmetries, and in some cases also time-reversal symmetry. One particularly striking example is a state spontaneously breaking lattice rotation symmetry, where the cubic lattice breaks up into bilayers, each of which forms a two-dimensional chiral spin liquid state.
We explore the phase diagram of the
SU(N) Hubbard models describing fermionic alkaline-earth-metal atoms in a square optical lattice with, on average, one atom per site, using a slave rotor mean-field approach. We find that the chiral spin liquid (CSL) predicted for $N\ensuremath{\ge}5$ and large interactions passes through a fractionalized state with a spinon Fermi surface as interactions are decreased before transitioning to a weakly interacting metal. We show that by adding a uniform artificial gauge field with $2\ensuremath{\pi}/N$ flux per plaquette, the CSL becomes the ground state for all $N\ensuremath{\ge}3$ at intermediate interactions, persists to weaker interactions, and exhibits a larger spin gap. For $N\ensuremath{\ge}5$ we find the CSL is the ground state everywhere the system is a Mott insulator. The gauge field stabilization of the CSL at lower interactions, and thus at weaker lattice depths, together with the increased spin gap, can relax the temperature constraints required for its experimental realization in ultracold atom systems.
We numerically study the quantum magnetism of ultracold alkali and alkaline-earth fermion systems with large hyperfine spin
F=23, which are characterized by a generic
Sp(N) symmetry with
N=4. The methods of exact diagonalization (ED) and density matrix renormalization group are employed for the large size one-dimensional (1D) systems, and the ED method is applied to a two-dimensional (2D) square lattice on small sizes. We focus on the magnetic exchange models in the Mott-insulating state at quarter-filling. Both 1D and 2D systems exhibit rich phase diagrams depending on the ratio between the spin exchanges
J0 and
J2 in the bond spin singlet and quintet channels, respectively. In one dimension, the ground states exhibit a long-range-ordered dimerization with a finite spin gap at
J0/J2>1 and a gapless spin-liquid state at ${J}_{0}/{J}_{2}\ensuremath{\leqslant}1$, respectively. In the former and latter cases, the correlation functions exhibit the two-site and four-site periodicities, respectively. In two-dimensions, various spin-correlation functions are calculated up to the size of $4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4$. The N\'eel-type spin correlation dominates at large values of
J0/J2, while a $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}2$ plaquette correlation is prominent at small values of this ratio. Between them, a columnar spin-Peierls dimerization correlation peaks. We infer the competition among the plaquette ordering, the dimer ordering, and the N\'eel ordering in the 2D system.
We show that, in the presence of a π/2 artificial gauge field per plaquette, Mott insulating phases of ultracold fermions with SU(N) symmetry and one particle per site generically possess an extended chiral phase with intrinsic topological order characterized by an approximate ground space of N low-lying singlets for periodic boundary conditions, and by chiral edge states described by the SU(N)_{1} Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten conformal field theory for open boundary conditions. This has been achieved by extensive exact diagonalizations for N between 3 and 9, and by a parton construction based on a set of N Gutzwiller projected fermionic wave functions with flux π/N per triangular plaquette. Experimental implications are briefly discussed.
Motivated by experiments on ultracold atoms which have realized the Haldane model for a Chern insulator, we consider its strongly correlated Mott limit with spin-
21 fermions. We find that slave rotor mean-field theory yields gapped or gapless chiral spin liquid Mott insulators. To study competing magnetic orders, we consider the strong coupling effective spin Hamiltonian which includes chiral three-spin exchange. We obtain its classical phase diagram, uncovering various chiral magnetic orders including tetrahedral, cone, and noncoplanar spiral states which can compete with putative chiral quantum spin liquids. We study the effect of thermal fluctuations on these states, identifying crossovers in the spin chirality, and phase transitions associated with lattice symmetry breaking. We also discuss analogous effective spin Hamiltonians for correlated spin-
21 bosons. Finally, we point out possible experimental implications of our results for cold atom experiments.