Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Spin-liquid phase in a spin-1/2 quantum magnet on the kagome lattice
Sergei V. Isakov, Yong Baek Kim, Arun Paramekanti
Abstract
We study a model of hard-core bosons with short-range repulsive interactions at half filling on the kagome lattice. Using quantum Monte Carlo numerics, we find that this model shows a continuous superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition, with exponents $z=1$ and $\ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\approx}0.67(5)$. The insulator, ${\mathcal{I}}^{*}$, exhibits short-ranged density and bond correlations, topological order, and exponentially decaying spatial vison correlations, all of which point to a ${Z}_{2}$ fractionalized phase. We estimate the vison gap in ${\mathcal{I}}^{*}$ from the temperature dependence of the energy. Our results, together with the equivalence between hard-core bosons and $S=1/2$ spins, provide compelling evidence for a spin-liquid phase in an easy-axis spin-$1/2$ model with no special conservation laws.