Dirac-Type Nodal Spin Liquid Revealed by Refined Quantum Many-Body Solver Using Neural-Network Wave Function, Correlation Ratio, and Level Spectroscopy

By Y. Nomura, M. Imada. Physical Review X, 2020

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pursuing fractionalized particles that do not bear properties of conventional measurable objects, exemplified by bare particles in the vacuum such as electrons and elementary excitations such as magnons, is a challenge in physics. Here we show that a machine-learning method for quantum many-body systems that has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy reveals the existence of a quantum spin liquid (QSL) phase in the region $0.49\lesssim J_2/J_1\lesssim 0.54$ convincingly in spin-1/2 frustrated Heisenberg model with the nearest and next-nearest neighbor exchanges, $J_1$ and $J_2$, respectively, on the square lattice. This is achieved by combining with the cutting-edge computational schemes known as the correlation ratio and level spectroscopy to mitigate the finite-size effects. The quantitative one-to-one correspondence between the correlations in the ground state and the excitation spectra found enables the reliable identification and estimate of the QSL and its nature. The spin excitation spectra containing both singlet and triplet gapless Dirac-like dispersions signal the emergence of gapless fractionalized spin-1/2 Dirac-type spinons in the distinctive QSL phase. Unexplored critical behavior with coexisting and dual power-law decays of N\'eel antiferromagnetic and dimer correlations is revealed, where the exponents for the algebraic N\'eel and dimer correlations vary with the parameter $J_2/J_1$ in the QSL phase with different exponents, but a single point satisfying the symmetry of the two correlations. The isomorph of excitations with the cuprate $d$-wave superconductors revealed here implies a tight connection between the present QSL and superconductivity. This achievement demonstrates that the quantum-state representation using machine learning techniques, which had mostly been limited to benchmarks, is a promising tool for investigating grand challenges in quantum many-body physics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e25fe03a2d00936e5e442c3b75728013ba8b317

Citations in the corpus

• Thermodynamics (2021, unknown): “[30] to improve the accuracy of the ground state of the Heisenberg model and later used to compute the phase diagram of the J 1 − J 2 square lattice Heisenberg model [31].”