Non-Abelian chiral spin liquid in a quantum antiferromagnet revealed by an iPEPS study
Résumé
Abelian and non-Abelian topological phases exhibiting protected chiral edge modes are ubiquitous in the realm of the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) effect. Here, we investigate a spin-1 Hamiltonian on the square lattice which could, potentially, host the spin liquid analog of the (bosonic) non-Abelian Moore-Read FQH state, as suggested by exact diagonalization of small clusters. Using families of fully SU(2)-spin symmetric and translationally invariant chiral projected entangled pair states (PEPS), variational energy optimization is performed using infinite-PEPS methods, providing good agreement with density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) results. A careful analysis of the bulk spin-spin and dimer-dimer correlation functions in the optimized spin liquid suggests that they exhibit long-range “gossamer tails”. From the investigation of the entanglement spectrum, we observe sharply defined chiral edge modes following the prediction of the SU(2)2 Wess-Zumino-Witten theory and exhibiting a conformal field theory (CFT) central charge c=3/2, as expected for a Moore-Read chiral spin liquid. Using the PEPS bulk-edge correspondence, we argue the “weak” criticality of the bulk is in fact a finite-D artifact of the chiral PEPS, which quickly becomes (practically) irrelevant as the PEPS bond dimension D is increased. We conclude that the PEPS formalism offers an unbiased and efficient method to investigate non-Abelian chiral spin liquids in quantum antiferromagnets.
Domaines
Physique Générale [physics.gen-ph]
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