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arXiv:2212.08767

Electronic Density of States of a $U\left(1\right)$ Quantum Spin Liquid with Spinon Fermi Surface. I. Orbital Magnetic Field Effects

Wen‐Yu He, Patrick A. Lee

Published Dec 17, 2022• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum spin liquid (QSL) with spinon Fermi surface is an exotic insulator that hosts neutral Fermi surfaces inside the gap. In an external magnetic field, it has been pointed out that the neutral Fermi surfaces are Landau quantized to form Landau levels (LLs) due to the induced emergent gauge magnetic field. In this work, we calculate the electronic density of states (DOS) of the QSL in an orbital magnetic field. We find that the LLs from the neutral Fermi surfaces give rise to a set of steps emerging at the upper and lower Hubbard band edges. Each of the Hubbard band edge steps further develop into a band edge resonance peak when a weak gauge binding from the gauge field fluctuations is taken into account. Importantly, each Hubbard band edge step and its resulting resonance peak in the weak gauge binding are found to have a correspondence LL from the neutral Fermi surfaces, so the Hubbard band edge steps and the band edge resonance peaks are the unique features that characterize the Landau quantization of the in-gap neutral Fermi surfaces. We further consider the strong gauge binding regime where the band edge resonance peaks move into the Mott gap and develop into true in-gap bound states. In the strong gauge binding regime, we solve the bound state LL spectrum. For the bound state with a Mexican hat like band dispersion, we find that the envelop energy to have a state excited from the bound state LL decreases quadratically with the magnetic field. The quadratic decrease behavior of the envelop energy is consistent with the intuition that applying magnetic field localizes the states and energetically promotes the in-gap bound states formation. Finally, we connect our results to the electronic DOS spectra measured in the layered 1T-TaS$_2$. We point out that a QSL with a quasi-bound state in the upper Hubbard band can give the DOS spectra similar to the one measured in the experiment.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2212.08767

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Electronic Density of States of a U(1)U\left(1\right)U(1) Quantum Spin Liquid with Spinon Fermi Surface. I. Orbital Magnetic Field Effects
Quantum spin liquid (QSL) with spinon Fermi surface is an exotic insulator that hosts neutral Fermi surfaces inside the gap. In an external magnetic field, it has been pointed out that the neutral Fermi surfaces are Landau quantized to form Landau levels (LLs) due to the induced emergent gauge magnetic field. In this work, we calculate the electronic density of states (DOS) of the QSL in an orbital magnetic field. We find that the LLs from the neutral Fermi surfaces give rise to a set of steps emerging at the upper and lower Hubbard band edges. Each of the Hubbard band edge steps further develop into a band edge resonance peak when a weak gauge binding from the gauge field fluctuations is taken into account. Importantly, each Hubbard band edge step and its resulting resonance peak in the weak gauge binding are found to have a correspondence LL from the neutral Fermi surfaces, so the Hubbard band edge steps and the band edge resonance peaks are the unique features that characterize the Landau quantization of the in-gap neutral Fermi surfaces. We further consider the strong gauge binding regime where the band edge resonance peaks move into the Mott gap and develop into true in-gap bound states. In the strong gauge binding regime, we solve the bound state LL spectrum. For the bound state with a Mexican hat like band dispersion, we find that the envelop energy to have a state excited from the bound state LL decreases quadratically with the magnetic field. The quadratic decrease behavior of the envelop energy is consistent with the intuition that applying magnetic field localizes the states and energetically promotes the in-gap bound states formation. Finally, we connect our results to the electronic DOS spectra measured in the layered 1T-TaS2_22​. We point out that a QSL with a quasi-bound state in the upper Hubbard band can give the DOS spectra similar to the one measured in the experiment.
The authors study the orbital magnetic field induced Landau quantization of a quantum spin liquid with spinon Fermi surface. In the electronic density of states of the quantum spin liquid, the Landau quantization is found to induce a set of band-edge steps, band-edge resonance peaks, or in-gap bound states when the gauge-field fluctuations are negligible, weak, or strong, respectively. The results indicate that the Landau quantization of the spinon Fermi surface can be detected through scanning tunneling microscope measurements.
This work studies the Zeeman magnetic field effect on a quantum spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface. In the absence of gauge binding, the quantum spin liquid electronic density of states exhibits no Zeeman shift in the threshold energy. As the gauge binding increases, the band edge resonance peaks exhibit a reduced Zeeman shift and eventually have the Zeeman shift direction reversed for a sufficiently large gauge binding. The authors further suggest to use such anomalous Zeeman response to identify the gapless quantum spin liquid phase.
We solve the problem of a magnetic impurity coupled to a U(1)U(1)U(1) quantum spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface, and we compute the impurity spectral function. Using the slave rotor mean-field approach combined with gauge field fluctuations, we find that a peak located at the top of the lower Hubbard band and one at the bottom of the upper Hubbard band can emerge in the impurity spectral function. The peaks at the Hubbard band edges arise from the gauge field fluctuation-induced spinon-chargon binding inside the spinon Kondo screening cloud of the magnetic impurity. For a magnetic impurity embedded in a Mott insulator, our findings suggest that the emergence of a pair of peaks at the Hubbard band edges in the impurity density of states spectra provides strong evidence that the host Mott insulator is a U(1)U(1)U(1) quantum spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface.
Resorting to a recently developed theoretical device called dimensional regularization for quantum criticality with a Fermi surface, we examine a metal-insulator quantum phase transition from a Landau's Fermi-liquid state to a U(1) spin-liquid phase with a spinon Fermi surface in two dimensions. Unfortunately, we fail to approach the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point from the U(1) spin-liquid state within the dimensional regularization technique. Self-interactions between charge fluctuations called holons are not screened, which shows a run-away renormalization group flow, interpreted as holons remain gapped. This leads us to consider another fixed point, where the spinon Fermi surface can be destabilized across the Mott transition. Based on this conjecture, we reveal the nature of the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point: Dimensional reduction to one dimension occurs for spin dynamics described by spinons. As a result, Landau damping for both spin and charge dynamics disappear in the vicinity of the Mott quantum critical point. When the flavor number of holons is over its critical value, an interacting fixed point appears to be identified with an inverted XYXYXY universality class, controlled within the dimensional regularization technique. On the other hand, a fluctuation-driven first order metal-insulator transition results when it is below the critical number. We propose that the destabilization of a spinon Fermi surface and the emergence of one-dimensional spin dynamics near the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point can be checked out by spin susceptibility with a 2kF2{k}_{F}2kF​ transfer momentum, where kF{k}_{F}kF​ is a Fermi momentum in the U(1) spin-liquid state: The absence of Landau damping in U(1) gauge fluctuations gives rise to a divergent behavior at zero temperature while it vanishes in the presence of a spinon Fermi surface.
Motivated by recent experimental observations of Kondo resonances in cobalt atoms on single layer 1T-TaSe2_{2}2​, we theoretically investigate the effect of coupling a U(1) quantum spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface to a lattice of Anderson impurities. Within the slave-rotor formalism, we find that above a critical coupling strength between the spin liquid and impurity lattice, the spinons hybridize to form heavy quasiparticles near the Fermi level, realizing a {\it spinon Kondo lattice phase} analogous to heavy fermion materials. Using the Bethe-Salpeter equation and accounting for emergent gauge fluctuations, we compute the spectral density and density of states, revealing the formation of spinon-chargon bound states in the spinon Kondo lattice phase. We characterize the thermodynamic and spectroscopic signatures of this phase, demonstrating specific heat and neutron scattering responses distinct from a pure quantum spin liquid. Our findings establish the spinon Kondo lattice as a framework to study the rich physics of spin liquids.
Mott insulators with localized magnetic moments will exhibit a quantum spin liquid state when the quantum fluctuations are strong enough to suppress the ordering of the spins. Such an entangled state will give rise to collective excitations, in which spin and charge information are carried separately. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements on single-layer 1T-TaS_{2} show a flat band around the zone center and a gap opening of about 200 meV in the low temperature, indicating 2D Mott insulating nature in the system. This flat band is dispersionless in momentum space but shows anomalously broad width around the zone center and the spectral weight decays rapidly as momentum increases. The observation is described as a spectral continuum from electron fractionalization, corroborated by a low energy effective model. The intensity of the flat band is reduced by surface doping with magnetic adatoms and the gap is closing, a result from the interaction between spin impurities coupled with spinons and the chargons, which gives rise to a charge redistribution. Doping with nonmagnetic impurities behaves differently as the chemical potential shift dominates. These findings provide insight into the quantum spin liquid states of strongly correlated electrons on 2D triangular lattices.