Abstract Quantum magnets provide the simplest example of strongly interacting quantum matter, yet they continue to resist a comprehensive understanding above one spatial dimension. We explore a promising framework in two dimensions, the Dirac spin liquid (DSL) — quantum electrodynamics (QED 3 ) with 4 Dirac fermions coupled to photons. Importantly, its excitations include magnetic monopoles that drive confinement. We address previously open key questions — the symmetry actions on monopoles on square, honeycomb, triangular and kagome lattices. The stability of the DSL is enhanced on triangular and kagome lattices compared to bipartite (square and honeycomb) lattices. We obtain the universal signatures of the DSL on triangular and kagome lattices, including those of monopole excitations, as a guide to numerics and experiments on existing materials. Even when unstable, the DSL helps unify and organize the plethora of ordered phases in correlated two-dimensional materials.
Abstract Quantum magnets provide the simplest example of strongly interacting quantum matter, yet they continue to resist a comprehensive understanding above one spatial dimension. We explore a promising framework in two dimensions, the Dirac spin liquid (DSL) — quantum electrodynamics (QED 3 ) with 4 Dirac fermions coupled to photons. Importantly, its excitations include magnetic monopoles that drive confinement. We address previously open key questions — the symmetry actions on monopoles on square, honeycomb, triangular and kagome lattices. The stability of the DSL is enhanced on triangular and kagome lattices compared to bipartite (square and honeycomb) lattices. We obtain the universal signatures of the DSL on triangular and kagome lattices, including those of monopole excitations, as a guide to numerics and experiments on existing materials. Even when unstable, the DSL helps unify and organize the plethora of ordered phases in correlated two-dimensional materials.
The interplay of symmetry and topology has been at the forefront of recent progress in quantum matter.Here, we uncover an unexpected connection between band topology and the description of competing orders in a quantum magnet.Specifically, we show that aspects of band topology protected by crystalline symmetries determine key properties of the Dirac spin liquid (DSL), which can be defined on the honeycomb, square, triangular, and kagome lattices.At low energies, the DSL on all of these lattices is described by an emergent quantum electrodynamics (QED 3 ) with N f ¼ 4 flavors of Dirac fermions coupled to a Uð1Þ gauge field.However, the symmetry properties of the magnetic monopoles, an important class of critical degrees of freedom, behave very differently on different lattices.In particular, we show that the lattice momentum and angular momentum of monopoles can be determined from the charge (or Wannier) centers of the corresponding spinon insulator.We also show that for DSLs on bipartite lattices, there always exists a monopole that transforms trivially under all microscopic symmetries owing to the existence of a parent SUð2Þ gauge theory.We connect our results to generalized Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorems and also derive the time-reversal and reflection properties of monopoles.Our results indicate that recent insights into free-fermion band topology can also guide the description of strongly correlated quantum matter.
Quantum spin liquids are exotic phases of quantum matter especially pertinent to many modern condensed matter systems. Dirac spin liquids (DSLs) are a class of gapless quantum spin liquids that do not have a quasi-particle description and are potentially realized in a wide variety of spin 1/2 1 / 2 magnetic systems on 2d 2 d lattices. In particular, the DSL in square lattice spin- 1/2 1 / 2 magnets is described at low energies by (2+1)d ( 2 + 1 ) d quantum electrodynamics with N_f=4 N f = 4 flavors of massless Dirac fermions minimally coupled to an emergent U(1) U ( 1 ) gauge field. The existence of a relevant, symmetry-allowed monopole perturbation renders the DSL on the square lattice intrinsically unstable. We argue that the DSL describes a stable continuous phase transition within the familiar Neel phase (or within the Valence Bond Solid (VBS) phase). In other words, the DSL is an ``unnecessary’’ quantum critical point within a single phase of matter. Our result offers a novel view of the square lattice DSL in that the critical spin liquid can exist within either the Neel or VBS state itself, and does not require leaving these conventional states.
Frustrated magnetism provides a rich platform for realizing exotic quantum phases in condensed matter systems. Among these, quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are a particularly intriguing class of states that exhibit no magnetic ordering and preserve all symmetries down to zero temperature. Just as conventional magnets can be thought of as spin crystals,QSLs represent their liquid analogs. This thesis explores two broad types of QSLs in two-dimensional magnets, with a focus on their dynamic properties and the nature of transitions from conventional magnetic states into QSL phases. QSLs are topological phases that host fractionalized excitations known as spinons. In these states, mobile spinons are coupled to an emergent gauge field, forming a highly entangled phase of matter. The first part of this thesis focuses on Dirac spin liquids (DSLs), a class of QSLs where spinons exhibit a gapless Dirac dispersion. To study the dynamicsof these spin liquids beyond leading-order mean-field theory, we develop a novel large-N fermionic limit of gapless spinons. In this limit, all gauge excitations are suppressed, and the leading-order corrections instead arise from order parameter fluctuations, which may condense and drive transitions into symmetry-broken phases from the parent DSL. Incorporating random phase approximation (RPA) corrections to the spin susceptibility, we find that sharp, spin-wave–like modes are recovered in the excitation spectrum. This methodology successfully captures characteristic features of the dynamics near phase transitions and in weakly symmetry-broken phases proximate to a DSL. We apply this approach to microscopic models, including the J1-J2 XXZ model on the triangular lattice and the J1-J3 XXZ model on the honeycomb lattice. These models closely represent a wide range of frustrated materials, such as triangular and honeycomb cobaltates and triangular ytterbium compounds. Our theoretical predictions show excellent agreement with experimentally measured inelastic neutron scattering spectra from these materials. Gapless spinons can also sometimes become gapped through chiral symmetry breaking, leading to the formation of a chiral spin liquid (CSL). The CSL is an archetypal bosonic realization of a fractional quantum Hall (FQH) state at half-filling, and has been proposed as a time-reversal–breaking ground state in a variety of frustrated spin models. The second part of this thesis addresses the intriguing possibility of realizing a CSL through the "melting" of a chiral spin crystal—a conventional magnet with non-coplanar ordering. Such a transition offers a physically appealing analogue to the melting of a Wigner crystal into a fermionic FQH liquid. Focusing on the kagome lattice, where chiral interactions are knownto stabilize a CSL ground state, we study the effects of additional long-range Heisenberg interactions and demonstrate a phase transition into a non-coplanar octahedral magnetic order. To describe the universal class of transition between a CSL and a non-coplanar anti-ferromagnetic order, we then develop a novel Chern-Simons–matter field theory framework, constrained by symmetry principles and symmetry fractionalization patterns. This thesis thus provides new insights into the dynamical signatures and phase transitions of quantum spin liquids, offering a bridge between theoretical models and experimental observations in frustrated magnetic systems.
Quantum electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions ( QED3 ) has been proposed as a critical field theory describing the low-energy effective theory of a putative algebraic Dirac spin liquid or of quantum phase transitions in two-dimensional frustrated magnets. We provide compelling evidence that the intricate spectrum of excitations of the elementary but strongly frustrated J1−J2 Heisenberg model on the triangular lattice is in one-to-one correspondence to a zoo of excitations from QED3 , in the quantum spin liquid regime. This evidence includes a large manifold of explicitly constructed monopole and bilinear excitations of QED3 , which is thus shown to serve as an organizing principle of phases of matter in triangular lattice antiferromagnets and their low-lying excitations. Moreover, we observe signatures of emergent valence-bond solid (VBS) correlations, which can be interpreted either as evidence of critical VBS fluctuations of an emergent Dirac spin liquid or as a transition from the 120° Néel order to a VBS whose quantum critical point is described by QED3 . Our results are obtained by comparing ansatz wave functions from a parton construction to exact eigenstates obtained using large-scale exact diagonalization up to N=48 sites. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Unnecessary quantum criticality in SU(3) kagome magnets
Algebraic/Dirac spin liquids (DSLs) are a class of critical quantum ground states that do not have a quasi-particle description. DSLs and related spin liquid phases often arise in strongly frustrated quantum spin systems, in which strong correlations and quantum fluctuations among constituent spins persist down to zero temperature. In this work, we analyze Mott insulating phases of SU(3) S U ( 3 ) fermions on a kagome lattice which may realize a DSL phase, described at low energies by (2 + 1)d ( 2 + 1 ) d quantum electrodynamics (QED _3 3 ) with N_f=6 N f = 6 Dirac fermions. By analyzing the action of physical symmetries on the operators of the QED _3 3 theory, we conclude that the low energy DSL is a quantum critical point that can be accessed by tuning a single microscopic parameter. Aided by the emergent symmetry and anomalies of the low energy effective theory, we conjecture and present supporting arguments that the SU(3) S U ( 3 ) Kagome magnet DSL is an unnecessary quantum critical point, lying completely within a single phase.
Theory of Dirac spin liquids on spin-S triangular lattice: possible application to α-CrOOH(D)
Triangular lattice quantum antiferromagnet has recently emerged to be a promising playground for realizing Dirac spin liquids (DSLs) -- a class of highly entangled quantum phases hosting emergent gauge fields and gapless Dirac fermions. While previous theories and experiments focused mainly on S=1/2 spin systems, more recently signals of a DSL were detected in an S=3/2 system α-CrOOH(D). In this work we develop a theory of DSLs on triangular lattice with spin-S moments. We argue that in the most natural scenario, a spin-S system realizes a U(2S) DSL, described at low energy by gapless Dirac fermions coupled with an emergent U(2S) gauge field (also known as U(2S) QCD3). An appealing feature of this scenario is that at sufficiently large S, the U(2S) QCD becomes intrinsically unstable toward spontaneous symmetry breaking and confinement. The confined phase is simply the 120∘ coplanar magnetic order, which agrees with semiclassical (large-S) results on simple Heisenberg-like models. Other scenarios are nevertheless possible, especially at small S when quantum fluctuations are strong. For S=3/2, we argue that a U(1) DSL is also theoretically possible and phenomenologically compatible with existing measurements. One way to distinguish the U(3) DSL from the U(1) DSL is to break time-reversal symmetry, for example by adding a spin chirality term Si⋅(Sj×Sk) in numerical simulations: the U(1) DSL becomes the standard Kalmeyer-Laughlin chiral spin liquid with semion/anti-semion excitation; the U(3) DSL, in contrast, becomes a non-abelian chiral spin liquid described by the SU(2)3 topological order, with Fibonacci-like anyons.