Exotic topological point and line nodes in the plaquette excitations of a frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the honeycomb lattice

TL;DR

This paper uncovers exotic topological nodes in the triplet excitations of a frustrated honeycomb antiferromagnet, revealing rare topological phenomena in spin-disordered phases and exploring their evolution and topological phases.

Contribution

It develops a six-spin plaquette operator theory and an effective boson model to analyze topological nodes in a frustrated Heisenberg honeycomb system, a novel approach in this context.

Findings

Discovery of Dirac, quadratic, and triple band touching points.

Identification of degenerate Dirac line nodes.

Emergence of topological phases with time-reversal symmetry breaking.

Abstract

A number of topological nodes including Dirac, quadratic and triple band touching points as well as a pair of degenerate Dirac line nodes are found to emerge in the triplet plaquette excitations of the frustrated spin-1/2 $J_1$-$J_2$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg honeycomb model when the ground state of the system lies in a spin-disordered plaquette-valence-bond-solid phase. A six-spin plaquette operator theory of this honeycomb model has been developed for this purpose by using the eigenstates of an isolated Heisenberg hexagonal plaquette. Spin-1/2 operators are thus expressed in the Fock space spanned by the plaquette operators those are obtained in terms of exact analytic form of eigenstates for a single frustrated Heisenberg hexagon. Ultimately, an effective interacting boson model of this system is obtained on the basis of low energy singlets and triplets plaquette operators by employing a mean-field approximation. The values of ground state energy and spin gap of this system have been estimated and the validity of this formalism has been tested upon comparison with the known results. Emergence of topological point and line nodes on the basis of spin-disordered ground state noted in this investigation is very rare on any frustrated system as well as the presence of triplet flat band. Evolution of those topological nodes is studied throughout the full frustrated regime. Finally, emergence of topological phases has been reported upon adding a time-reversal-symmetry breaking term to the Hamiltonian. Coexistence of spin gap with either topological nodes or phases turns this honeycomb model an interesting one.