Haldane-Hubbard Mott Insulator: From Tetrahedral Spin Crystal to Chiral Spin Liquid

Motivated by cold atom experiments on Chern insulators, we study the honeycomb lattice Haldane-Hubbard Mott insulator of spin-1/2 fermions using exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods. We show that this model exhibits various chiral magnetic orders including a wide re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2016-04, Vol.116 (13), p.137202-137202, Article 137202
Main Authors: Hickey, Ciarán, Cincio, Lukasz, Papić, Zlatko, Paramekanti, Arun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cold atoms
Crystals
Entanglement
Field theory
Honeycomb
Insulators
Modular
Spin liquid
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Summary:Motivated by cold atom experiments on Chern insulators, we study the honeycomb lattice Haldane-Hubbard Mott insulator of spin-1/2 fermions using exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods. We show that this model exhibits various chiral magnetic orders including a wide regime of triple-Q tetrahedral order. Incorporating third-neighbor hopping frustrates and ultimately melts this tetrahedral spin crystal. From analyzing the low energy spectrum, many-body Chern numbers, entanglement spectra, and modular matrices, we identify the molten state as a chiral spin liquid (CSL) with gapped semion excitations. We formulate and study the Chern-Simons-Higgs field theory of the exotic CSL-to-tetrahedral spin crystallization transition.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/physrevlett.116.137202