There is growing evidence from both experiment and numerical studies that low half-odd integer quantum spins on a kagome lattice with predominant antiferromagnetic near-neighbor interactions do not order magnetically or break lattice symmetries even at temperatures much lower than the exchange interaction strength. Moreover, there appears to be a plethora of low-energy excitations, predominantly singlets but also spin carrying, which suggests that the putative underlying quantum spin liquid is a gapless ``critical spin liquid'' rather than a gapped spin liquid with topological order. Here, we develop an effective field theory approach for the spin-
21 Heisenberg model with easy-plane anisotropy on the kagome lattice. By employing a vortex duality transformation, followed by a fermionization and flux smearing, we obtain access to a gapless yet stable critical spin liquid phase, which is described by
(2+1)-dimensional quantum electrodynamics
(QED3) with an emergent SU(8) flavor symmetry. The specific heat, thermal conductivity, and dynamical structure factor are extracted from the effective field theory, and contrasted with other theoretical approaches to the kagome antiferromagnet.
In this paper we theoretically report an unconventional quantum phase transition of a simple Lipkin–Meshkov–Glick model: an interacting collective spin system without external magnetic field. It is shown that this model with integer-spin can exhibit a first-order quantum phase transition between different disordered phases, and more intriguingly, possesses a hidden supersymmetry at the critical point. However, for half-integer spin we predict another first-order quantum phase transition between two different long-range-ordered phases with a vanishing energy gap, which is induced by the destructive topological quantum interference between the intanton and anti-instanton tunneling paths and accompanies spontaneously breaking of supersymmetry at the same critical point. We also show that, when the total spin-value varies from half-integer to integer this model can exhibit an abrupt variation of Berry phase from π to zero.
The rigid rotor is a classic problem in quantum mechanics, describing the dynamics of a rigid body with its center of mass held fixed. It is well known to describe the rotational spectra of molecules. The configuration space of this problem is SO(3), the space of all rotations in three dimensions. This is a topological space with two types of closed loops: trivial loops that can be adiabatically shrunk to a point and nontrivial loops that cannot. In the traditional formulation of the problem, stationary states are periodic over both types of closed loops. However, periodicity conditions may change if Berry phases are introduced. We argue that time-reversal symmetry allows for only one new possibility---a Berry phase of $\ensuremath{\pi}$ attached to all nontrivial loops. We derive the corresponding stationary states by exploiting the connection between SO(3) and SU(2) spaces. The solutions are antiperiodic over any nontrivial loop; i.e., stationary states reverse sign under a $2\ensuremath{\pi}$ rotation about any axis. Remarkably, this framework is realized in the low-energy physics of certain quantum magnets. The magnets must satisfy the following conditions: (a) the classical ground states are unpolarized, carrying no net magnetization, (b) the set of classical ground states is indexed by SO(3), and (c) the product $N\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}S$ is a half-integer, where
N is the number of spins and
S is the spin quantum number. We demonstrate this result in a family of Heisenberg antiferromagnets defined on polygons with an odd number of vertices. At each vertex, we have a spin-
S moment that is coupled to its nearest neighbors. In the classical limit, these magnets have coplanar ground states. Their quantum spectra, at low energies, correspond to ``spherical top'' and ``symmetric top'' rigid rotors. For integer values of
S, we recover traditional rigid-rotor spectra. With half-integer
S, we obtain rotor spectra with a Berry phase of $\ensuremath{\pi}$.