Variational study of the ground state and spin dynamics of the spin- 12 kagome antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model and its implication for herbertsmithite ZnCu3(OH)6Cl2

Abstract

We find that the best RVB state of the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Kagome antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model(spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ KAFH) is described by a $Z_{2}$ gapped mean field ansatz, which hosts a mean field spinon dispersion very different from that of the widely studied $U(1)$ Dirac spin liquid state. However, we find that the physical spin fluctuation spectrum calculated from the Gutzwiller projected RPA(GRPA) theory above such an RVB state is actually gapless and is almost identical to that above the $U(1)$ Dirac spin liquid state. We find that such a peculiar behavior can be attributed to the unique flat band physics on the Kagome lattice, which makes the mapping between the mean field ansatz and the RVB state non-injective. We find that the spin fluctuation spectrum of the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ KAFH is not at all featureless, but is characterized by a prominent spectral peak at about $0.25J$ around the $\mathbf{M}$ point, which is immersed in a broad continuum extending to $2.7J$. Based on these results, we argue that the spectral peak below 2 meV in the inelastic neutron scattering(INS) spectrum of Hebertsmithite ZnCu$_{3}$(OH)$_{6}$Cl$_{2}$, which has been attributed to the contribution of Cu$^{2+}$ impurity spins occupying the Zn$^{2+}$ site, should rather be understood as the intrinsic contribution from the Kagome layer. We propose to verify such a picture by measuring the Knight shift on the Cu site, rather than the O site, which is almost blind to the spin fluctuation at the $\mathbf{M}$ point as a result of the strong antiferromagnetic correlation between nearest neighboring spins on the Kagome lattice.