Competing chiral magnetic orders in the strongly correlated Haldane-Hubbard model
Arun Paramekanti, Ciarán Hickey, Pratik Rath
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-1/2 fermions. A slave rotor mean field theory suggests the appearance of 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-1/2 bosons.
Bulletin of the American Physical Society•Jun 11, 2015•0 citations