Chiral Spin Liquids in Triangular-Lattice SU (N) Fermionic Mott Insulators with Artificial Gauge Fields

Nataf, P. and Lajkó, Miklós and Wietek, A. and Penc, Karlo and Mila, F. (2016) Chiral Spin Liquids in Triangular-Lattice SU (N) Fermionic Mott Insulators with Artificial Gauge Fields. PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, 117 (16). ISSN 0031-9007

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Abstract

We show that, in the presence of a π/2 artificial gauge field per plaquette, Mott insulating phases of ultra- cold fermions with SU (N ) symmetry and one particle per site generically possess an extended chiral phase with intrinsic topological order characterized by a multiplet of N low-lying singlet excitations for periodic boundary conditions, and by chiral edge states described by the SU (N )1 Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten conformal field theory for open boundary conditions. This has been achieved by extensive exact diagonalizations for N between 3 and 9, and by a parton construction based on a set of N Gutzwiller projected fermionic wave-functions with flux π/N per triangular plaquette. Experimental implications are briefly discussed.

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