A continuous family of fully-frustrated Heisenberg model on the Kagome lattice

TL;DR

This paper explores a continuous family of fully-frustrated Heisenberg models on the Kagome lattice, revealing flat band phenomena and their implications for spin liquid states, especially the U(1) Dirac spin liquid.

Contribution

It introduces a continuous family of frustrated Heisenberg models on the Kagome lattice and links flat band physics to the stability and description of spin liquid states.

Findings

The model exhibits a non-dispersive lowest band for certain exchange couplings.

Ground state stability is maintained when $J_2=J_3$ within a specific range.

The U(1) Dirac spin liquid can arise from a family of gauge inequivalent RVB states.

Abstract

We find that the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the Kagome lattice with nearest neighboring exchange coupling(NN-KAFH) belongs to a continuous family of fully-frustrated Heisenberg model on the Kagome lattice, which has no preferred classical ordering pattern. The model within this family consists of the first, second and the third neighboring exchange coupling $J_{1}$, $J_{2}$, and $J_{3}$, with $J_{2}=J_{3}$. We find that when $-J_{1}\leq J_{2}=J_{3}\leq 0.2J_{1}$, the lowest band of $J(\mathbf{q})$, namely, the Fourier transform of the exchange coupling, is totally non-dispersive. Exact diagonalization calculation indicates that the ground state of the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ NN-KAFH is locally stable under the perturbation of $J_{2}$ and $J_{3}$ when and only when $J_{2}=J_{3}$. Interestingly, we find that the same flat band physics is also playing an important role in the RVB description of the spin liquid state on the Kagome lattice. In particular, we show that the extensively studied $U(1)$ Dirac spin liquid state on the Kagome lattice can actually be generated from a continuous family of gauge inequivalent RVB mean field ansatz, which host very different mean field spinon dispersion.