Motivated by experimental studies that have found signatures of a quantum spin liquid phase in organic crystals whose structure is well described by the two-dimensional triangular lattice, we study the Hubbard model on this lattice at half filling using the infinite-system density matrix renormalization group (iDMRG) method. On infinite cylinders with finite circumference, we identify an intermediate phase between observed metallic behavior at low interaction strength and Mott insulating spin-ordered behavior at strong interactions. Chiral ordering from spontaneous breaking of time-reversal symmetry, a fractionally quantized spin Hall response, and characteristic level statistics in the entanglement spectrum in the intermediate phase provide strong evidence for the existence of a chiral spin liquid in the full two-dimensional limit of the model.
The existence of a gapped chiral spin liquid has been recently suggested in the vicinity of the metal-insulator transition of the Hubbard model on the triangular lattice, by intensive density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) simulations [A. Szasz, J. Motruk, M. P. Zaletel, and J. E. Moore, Phys. Rev. X 10, 021042 (2020)]. Here, we report the results obtained within the variational Monte Carlo technique based upon Jastrow-Slater wave functions, implemented with backflow correlations. As in DMRG calculations, we consider
N-leg cylinders. For
N=4 and in the presence of a next-nearest-neighbor hopping, a chiral spin liquid emerges between the metal and the insulator with magnetic quasi-long-range order. Within our approach, the chiral state is gapped and breaks the reflection symmetry. By contrast, for both
N=5 and 6, the chiral spin liquid is not the state with the lowest variational energy: in the former case, a nematic spin liquid is found in the entire insulating regime, while for the less frustrated case with
N=6 the results are very similar to that obtained on two-dimensional clusters [L. F. Tocchio, A. Montorsi, and F. Becca, Phys. Rev. B 102, 115150 (2020)], with an antiferromagnetic phase close to the metal-insulator transition and a nematic spin liquid in the strong-coupling regime.
Recent advances in moiré engineering motivate the study of lattice models of strongly-correlated electrons subjected to substantial orbital magnetic flux. We analyze the triangular lattice Hofstadter-Hubbard model at one-quarter flux quantum per plaquette and a density of one electron per site, where a chiral spin liquid phase may exist between weak-coupling integer quantum Hall and strong-coupling 120
∘ antiferromagnetic phases. We use matrix product state methods and analytical arguments to investigate this model compactified to cylinders of finite circumference. We uncover a glide particle-hole symmetry operation which, we argue, is spontaneously broken at the quantum Hall to spin liquid transition on odd-circumference cylinders. We numerically verify the spontaneous symmetry breaking and further demonstrate that this transition is associated with algebraic long-range correlations of various spin-singlet, charge-neutral operators. For even-circumference cylinders, the transition becomes a crossover associated with a large correlation length that grows substantially with circumference. Our findings suggest that in the two-dimensional limit, the transition to a chiral spin liquid phase is continuous and features critical fluctuations of the current.
Quantum spin liquids emerging near the metal-insulator transition have been a longstanding issue in physics. Here, the author identifies a chiral spin liquid in the half-filled triangular-lattice Hubbard model using state-of-the-art non-Abelian density matrix renormalization. By computing the spin chirality order parameter with unprecedented system sizes and high accuracy, the findings extrapolate toward the two-dimensional limit, impacting theoretical research and experimental realizations in ultracold-atom optical lattices and transition-metal dichalcogenide moir\'e materials.
We study the ground-state properties of the quantum spin liquid (QSL) phases of the spin-
1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the triangular lattice with nearest-
(J1), next-nearest-
(J2), and third-neighbor
(J3) interactions by using the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method. By combining parallel DMRG with
SU(2) spin rotational symmetry, we are able to obtain accurate results on large cylinders with length up to
Lx=48 and circumference
Ly=6−−12. Our results suggest that the QSL phase of the ${J}_{1}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{J}_{2}$ Heisenberg model is gapped, which is characterized by the absence of a gapless mode and by short-range spin-spin and dimer-dimer correlations. In the presence of
J3 interaction, we find that a critical QSL with a single gapless mode emerges. While both spin-spin and scalar chiral-chiral correlations are short ranged, dimer-dimer correlations are quasi long ranged and decay as a power law at long distances.