Abstract
Actively sought since the turn of the century, two-dimensional quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are exotic phases of matter where magnetic moments remain disordered even at zero temperature. Despite ongoing searches, QSLs remain elusive, due to a lack of concrete knowledge of the microscopic mechanisms that inhibit magnetic order in materials. Here we study a model for a broad class of frustrated magnetic rare-earth pyrochlore materials called quantum spin ices. When subject to an external magnetic field along the [111] crystallographic direction, the resulting interactions contain a mix of geometric frustration and quantum fluctuations in decoupled two-dimensional kagome planes. Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we identify a set of interactions sufficient to promote a groundstate with no magnetic long-range order, and a gap to excitations, consistent with a Z2 spin liquid phase. This suggests an experimental procedure to search for two-dimensional QSLs within a class of pyrochlore quantum spin ice materials.
Highlights
Sought since the turn of the century, two-dimensional quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are exotic phases of matter where magnetic moments remain disordered even at zero temperature
While the possibility for 3D QSLs in the above compounds is intriguing, spin ice materials offer a compelling mechanism for dimensional reduction to 2D, since single-ion anisotropy constrains magnetic moments to point along the local tetrahedral symmetry axes in the pyrochlore lattice
Through extensive quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we have studied a sign-problem-free model of frustrated quantum spins interacting on a two-dimensional kagome lattice
Summary
Sought since the turn of the century, two-dimensional quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are exotic phases of matter where magnetic moments remain disordered even at zero temperature. Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we identify a set of interactions sufficient to promote a groundstate with no magnetic long-range order, and a gap to excitations, consistent with a Z2 spin liquid phase This suggests an experimental procedure to search for two-dimensional QSLs within a class of pyrochlore quantum spin ice materials. Using large-scale QMC simulations, we show that a two-dimensional model on the kagome lattice descending from the quantum Hamiltonian discussed by Huang, Chen and Hermele[21] exhibits an exotic disordered phase—a quantum kagome ice state—in a wide range of Hamiltonian parameters Such a state displays exponentially decaying correlations and is consistent with a gapped QSL phase. These results suggest an alternative experimental route to search for the long-sought QSL phase in two dimensions starting from quantum spin ice pyrochlore materials subject to an external field along the [111] direction
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