From spin chains to chiral spin liquids
Dec. 6, 2023 (Wed.) at 1:30PM (ET)
International Institute of Physics, UFRN, Brazil
Chiral spin liquids are highly entangled phases of matter in which interacting spins break time reversal and reflection symmetries, but do not develop conventional magnetic order even at zero temperature. Frustrated magnets in two dimensions hold the promise of realizing some rather exotic chiral spin liquid phases in which fractional spin excitations obey non-Abelian statistics, but so far experimental realizations have remained elusive. I will discuss how junctions of quantum spin chains can be used as building blocks for several chiral spin liquids. In particular, a network of spin-1 chains realizes a chiral spin liquid in which fractional spin-1/2 excitations (spinons) bind Majorana zero modes. Among the applications of this construction, we show how the topological degeneracy of the two-dimensional phase is directly connected with the fusion rules inherited from the conformal field theory for the spin chains.