20,855 research outputs found

    An exact chiral spin liquid with non-Abelian anyons

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    We establish the existence of a chiral spin liquid (CSL) as the exact ground state of the Kitaev model on a decorated honeycomb lattice, which is obtained by replacing each site in the familiar honeycomb lattice with a triangle. The CSL state spontaneously breaks time reversal symmetry but preserves other symmetries. There are two topologically distinct CSLs separated by a quantum critical point. Interestingly, vortex excitations in the topologically nontrivial (Chern number ±1\pm 1) CSL obey non-Abelian statistics.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; published version in Phys. Rev. Let

    Fragile Mott Insulators

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    We prove that there exists a class of crystalline insulators, which we call "fragile Mott insulators" which are not adiabatically connected to any sort of band insulator provided time-reversal and certain point-group symmetries are respected, but which are otherwise unspectacular in that they exhibit no topological order nor any form of fractionalized quasiparticles. Different fragile Mott insulators are characterized by different nontrivial one-dimensional representations of the crystal point group. We illustrate this new type of insulators with two examples: the d-Mott insulator discovered in the checkerboard Hubbard model at half-filling and the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki insulator on the square lattice.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Published version in PRL. The name "Weak Mott Insulators" is changed to "Fragile Mott Insulators" to avoid confusing in terminolog

    Spontaneous symmetry breakings in two-dimensional kagome lattice

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    We study spontaneous symmetry breakings for fermions (spinless and spinful) on a two-dimensional kagome lattice with nearest-neighbor repulsive interactions in weak coupling limit, and focus in particular on topological Mott insulator instability. It is found that at 13\frac{1}{3}-filling where there is a quadratic band crossing at Γ\Gamma-point, in agreement with Ref. 1, the instabilities are infinitesimal and topological phases are dynamically generated. At 23\frac{2}{3}-filling where there are two inequivalent Dirac points, the instabilities are finite, and no topological phase is favored at this filling without breaking the lattice translational symmetry. A ferromagnetic quantum anomalous Hall state with infinitesimal instability is further proposed at half-filling of the bottom flat band.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Published in Phys. Rev.
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