On the stability of U(1) spin liquids in two dimensions
By M. Hermele, T. Senthil, Matthew Fisher, Patrick Lee, N. Nagaosa, X. Wen. 2004
223 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We establish that spin liquids described in terms of gapless fermionic (Dirac) spinons and gapless U(1) gauge fluctuations can be stable in two dimensions, at least when the physical SU(2) spin symmetry is generalized to SU(N). Equivalently, we show that compact QED3 has a deconfined phase for a large number of fermion fields, in the sense that monopole fluctuations can be irrelevant at low energies. A precise characterization is provided by an emergent global topological U(1) symmetry corresponding to the conservation of gauge flux. Beginning with an SU(N) generalization of the S=1/2 square lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet, we consider the pi-flux spin liquid and, via a systematic analysis of all operators, show that there are NO relevant perturbations (in the renormalization group sense) about the large-N spin liquid fixed point, which is thus a stable phase. We provide a further illustration of this conclusion with an approximate renormalization group calculation that treats the gapless fermions and the monopoles on an equal footing. This approach directly points out some of the flaws in the erroneous "screening" argument for the relevance of monopoles in compact QED3.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0345ce3213f74e7b8f4dc158c42cbd505369c882
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
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Citations in the corpus
- Quantum spin liquids (2019, background): “There also are gapless spin liquid phases where the quasiparticle description completely breaks down (21).”
- Quantum spin liquid states (2016, background): “Indeed, Hermele et al. (Hermele et al., 2004) proved that when the spin index is generalized to N flavors, deconfinement arises in the case of 2N 2-component Dirac fermions coupled to complex U(1) gauge fields for sufficiently large N , thus providing a counter example to confinement.”
- Doping a Mott insulator: Physics of high-temperature superconductivity (2004, background): “Another counter example is found by Wen, 2002b, Rantner and Wen, 2002 and Hermele et al., 2004 who showed that the U(1) gauge theory coupled to massless Dirac fermions is in a gapless phase (or the deconfined phase) for sufficiently large N (see section XI.”