Gapless Spin Liquid and Nonlocal Corner Excitation in the Spin-1/2 Heisenberg Antiferromagnet on Fractal

Abstract

Motivated by the mathematical beauty and the recent experimental realizations of fractal systems, we study the spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on a Sierpiński gasket. The fractal porous feature generates new kinds of frustration to exhibit exotic quantum states. Using advanced tensor network techniques, we identify a quantum gapless-spin-liquid ground state in fractional spatial dimension. This fractal spin system also demonstrates nontrivial nonlocal properties. While the extremely short-range correlation causes a highly degenerate spin form factor, the entanglement in this fractal system suggests a long-range scaling behavior. We also study the dynamic structure factor and clearly identify the gapless excitation with a stable corner excitation emerged from the ground-state entanglement. Our results unambiguously point out multiple essential properties of this fractal spin system, and open a new route to explore spin liquid and frustrated magnetism.