Emergent Chiral Spin Liquids in Frustrated Magnetism

Abstract

Topological states of matter are of of fundamental interest in contemporate condensed matter physics. Today, the fractional Quantum Hall effect remains the only known experimental system expected to exhibit intrinsic topological order. The question remains whether also different systems might stabilize this kind of ordering. Chiral spin liquids are an analogue of Fractional Quantum Hall Effect wave functions for spin systems. These wavefunctions have been envisioned in 1987 but only very recently several simple frustrated quantum spin models have been proposed realizing this physics. In this talk we will introduce chiral spin liquids, discuss their relation to the Fractional Quantum Hall effect and present our recent numerical studies that provide conclusive evidence for the emergence of this exotic state of matter in extended frustrated Heisenberg models. In the course of these projects novel algorithms and techniques for large scale Exact Diagonalization were developed and applied. We briefly discuss these techniques and show that they allow for sparse diagonalizations of Heisenberg systems up to 48-50 spin-1/2 particles.