Chiral Spin Liquids in Triangular-Lattice SU(N) Fermionic Mott Insulators with Artificial Gauge Fields

Pierre Nataf, Miklós Lajkó, Alexander Wietek, Karlo Penc, Frédéric Mila, and Andreas M. Läuchli
Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 167202 – Published 11 October 2016
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Abstract

We show that, in the presence of a π/2 artificial gauge field per plaquette, Mott insulating phases of ultracold fermions with SU(N) symmetry and one particle per site generically possess an extended chiral phase with intrinsic topological order characterized by an approximate ground space of N low-lying singlets for periodic boundary conditions, and by chiral edge states described by the SU(N)1 Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten conformal field theory for open boundary conditions. This has been achieved by extensive exact diagonalizations for N between 3 and 9, and by a parton construction based on a set of N Gutzwiller projected fermionic wave functions with flux π/N per triangular plaquette. Experimental implications are briefly discussed.

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  • Received 29 January 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.167202

© 2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Statistical Physics & ThermodynamicsCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Pierre Nataf1, Miklós Lajkó2, Alexander Wietek3, Karlo Penc4,5, Frédéric Mila1, and Andreas M. Läuchli3

  • 1Institute of Physics, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 2Institute for Solid State Physics, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa 277-8581, Japan
  • 3Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Innsbruck, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
  • 4Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, H-1525 Budapest, P.O.B. 49, Hungary
  • 5MTA-BME Lendület Magneto-optical Spectroscopy Research Group, 1111 Budapest, Hungary

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Issue

Vol. 117, Iss. 16 — 14 October 2016

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