We propose to describe the spin fluctuations in the normal state (spin-pseudogap phase) of underdoped high T(c) cuprates as a manifestation of an algebraic spin liquid. Within the slave boson implementation of spin-charge separation, the normal state is described by massless Dirac fermions, charged bosons, and a gauge field. The gauge interaction, as an exact marginal perturbation, drives the mean-field free-spinon fixed point to a new spin-quantum fixed point-the algebraic spin liquid. Luttinger-liquid-like line shapes for the electron spectral function are obtained in the normal state, and we show how a coherent quasiparticle peak appears as spin and charge recombine.
This review gives a rather general discussion of high temperature superconductors as an example of a strongly correlated material. The argument is made that in view of the many examples of unconventional superconductors discovered in the past twenty years, we should no longer be surprised that superconductivity emerges as a highly competitive ground state in systems where Coulomb repulsion plays a dominant role. The physics of the cuprates is discussed, emphasizing the unusual pseudogap phase in the underdoped region. It is argued that the resonating valence bond picture, as formulated using gauge theory with fermionic and bosonic matter fields, gives an adequate physical understanding, even though many details are beyond the powers of current calculational tools. The recent discovery of quantum oscillations in a high magnetic field is discussed in this context. Meanwhile, the problem of the quantum spin liquid (a spin system with antiferromagnetic coupling which refuses to order even at zero temperature) is a somewhat simpler version of the high T c problem where significant progress has been made recently. It is understood that the existence of matter fields can lead to deconfinement of the U (1) gauge theory in 2 + 1 dimensions, and novel new particles (called fractionalized particles), such as fermionic spinons which carry spin and no charge, and gapless gauge bosons can emerge to create a new critical state at low energies. We even have a couple of real materials where such a scenario may be realized experimentally. The paper ends with answers to questions such as: What limits T c if pairing is driven by an electronic energy scale? Why is the high T c problem hard? Why is there no consensus? And why is the high T c problem important?
We study the properties of a class of two-dimensional interacting critical states---dubbed algebraic spin liquids---that can arise in two-dimensional quantum magnets. A particular example that we focus on is the staggered flux spin liquid, which plays a key role in some theories of underdoped cuprate superconductors. We show that the low-energy theory of such states has much higher symmetry than the underlying microscopic spin system. This symmetry has remarkable consequences, leading in particular to the unification of a number of seemingly unrelated competing orders. The correlations of these orders---including, in the staggered flux state, the N\'eel vector, and the order parameter for the columnar and box valence-bond solid states---all exhibit the same slow power-law decay. Implications for experiments in the pseudogap regime of the cuprates and for numerical calculations on model systems are discussed.
Spin and charge are two fundamental degrees of freedom in strongly correlated electron systems. In this thesis we study low-energy effective theory and phase transitions of spin and charge in a variety of strongly correlated systems. First, we study effective theory of magnetic phase transition in Sp(4) spin system and iron-based superconductors. Quantum phase transitions beyond Landau paradigm has been proposed in SU(2) spill model. We generalize this paradigm to Sp(4) model, which can be realized using spin-[special characters omitted] cold atoms on optical lattice. In iron-based superconductors, we study low-energy effective theory for magnetic and structural phase transitions, and present a global phase diagram of the two phase transitions. Second, we study spin and charge fluctuations on triangular lattice, and compare our results with experiments on organic Mott insulator κ-(ET) 2(CN)2. We show that the spin liquid state observed in experiments can be explained by Z2 spin liquid theory which contains spin-½ spinon and Z2 vison excitations. We also argue that near the Mott-insulator-to-metal transition there are fractionalized spinless charge excitations, which form exciton bound states near the transition. At last, we study spin and charge excitations in high-T c cuprates. We describe fluctuating two-dimensional metallic antiferromagnets by a gauge-theoretic description of an 'algebraic charge liquid' involving spinless fermions and a spin S = 1/2 complex scalar. We propose a phenomenological effective lattice Hamiltonian which describes the binding of these particles into gauge-neutral, electron-like excitations, and describe its implications for the electron spectral function across the entire Brillouin zone. We discuss connections of our results to photoemission experiments in the pseudogap regime of the cuprate superconductors.
In recent work, we argued that a particular algebraic spin liquid (ASL) may be the ground state of the
S=1/2 kagome lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Furthermore, this state, which lacks a spin gap, is appealing in light of recent experiments on herbertsmithite
[ZnCu3(OH)6Cl2]. Here, we study the properties of this ASL in more detail using both the low-energy effective field theory and Gutzwiller-projected wave functions of fermionic spinons. We identify the competing orders of the ASL, which are observables having slowly decaying power-law correlations---among them we find a set of magnetic orders lying at the
M points of the Brillouin zone, the familiar $\mathbit{q}=0$ magnetic ordered state, the ``Hastings'' valence-bond solid (VBS) state, and a pattern of vector spin-chirality ordering corresponding to one of the Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya (DM) interaction terms present in herbertsmithite. Identification of some of these orders requires an understanding of the quantum numbers of magnetic monopole operators in the ASL. We discuss the detection of the magnetic and VBS competing orders in experiments. While we primarily focus on a clean system without DM interaction, we consider the effects of small DM interaction and argue that, surprisingly, it leads to spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry (for DM interaction that preserves
XY spin rotation symmetry, there is also
XY magnetic order). Our analysis of the projected wave function provides an estimate of the ``Fermi velocity''
vF that characterizes all low-energy excitations of the ASL---this allows us to estimate the specific heat, which compares favorably with experiments. We also study the spin and bond correlations of the projected wave function and compare these results with those of the effective field theory. While the spin correlations in the effective field theory and wave function seem to match rather well (although not completely), the bond correlations are more puzzling. We conclude with a discussion of experiments in herbertsmithite and make several predictions.
We begin by scrutinizing a recent proposal that presents an alternate description of the half-filled Landau level in terms of massless Dirac fermions. In Chapter \\ref{chap:HFLL}, we examine the possibility of pairing of these Dirac fermions by numerically solving the coupled Eliashberg equations unlike a related previous calculation (Wang and Chakravarty, 2016). In addition, vertex corrections are calculated to be zero from the Ward identity. We find that pairing is possible in non-zero angular momentum channels; only differences are minor numerical shifts. As before, the pairing leads to the gapped Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian states. However, in our approximation scheme, pairing is not possible in the putative particle–hole symmetric state for
l=0 angular momentum. The specific heat at low temperatures of a system of massless Dirac fermions interacting with a transverse gauge field, expected to be relevant for the half-filled Landau level, is calculated. Using the Luttinger formula, it is found to be
proptoTlnT in the leading low temperature limit, due to the exchange of transverse gauge bosons. The result agrees with the corresponding one in the nonrelativistic composite fermion theory of Halperin, Lee and Read of the half-filled Landau level.The rest of the thesis concerns the cuprate high-
Tc superconductors (``cuprates''). Conventional wisdom says that beyond the superconducting ``dome'' in cuprates, the material behaves as a Fermi liquid. However, this picture does not help explain the disappearance of the superconducting order parameter, and there are some anomalous measurements that cannot be explained by a Fermi liquid phase. It was proposed by Kopp, Ghosal, and Chakravarty that there is a \\emph{ferromagnetic} phase at zero temperature beyond the superconducting dome, and that fluctuations of the ferromagnetic order parameter compete with the superconducting order parameter and work to suppress the superconducting transition temperature \\cite{Kopp:2007fn}. In Chapter \\ref{chap:ferro} we summarize the experimental evidence for ferromagnetic fluctuations in the overdoped cuprates, and present several calculations supporting the existence of a ferromagnetic ground state in the 2D single-band Hubbard model, which model is thought to provide an adequate description of the cuprate superconductors.Another region of interest in the cuprate phase diagram is the pseudogap phase. It is unclear which of a host of competing order parameters is responsible for the behavior in this phase, such as the recent observation of an anomalous thermal Hall conductance in the cuprate La
2−xSr
xCuO
4 \\cite{Grissonnanche:2019gx}. One promising candidate is the
d-density wave state. In Chapter \\ref{chap:DMI}, we investigate the effect that density wave states have on the localized spins of a square lattice. We derive the effective Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction from first principles and study its effects on both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic backgrounds. We find that topologically nontrivial density wave states can induce stable DM interactions among the localized spins of the lattice when an external magnetic field is present. Furthermore, these density wave-induced DM vectors point along the external magnetic field's direction--implying that they break time-reversal and spin rotation symmetries in the same manner. Due to these symmetry considerations alone we find that the underlying magnon excitations cannot induce any thermal Hall effect. Utilizing a Holstein-Primakoff substitution about a mean-field ground state expansion we calculate the topological density wave corrections to magnetic ground state energy, spin canting angles, and the dispersion of the magnons for both the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic cases.