Electronic Density of States of a $U\left(1\right)$ Quantum Spin Liquid with Spinon Fermi Surface. I. Orbital Magnetic Field Effects

TL;DR

This paper investigates the electronic density of states in a U(1) quantum spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface under an orbital magnetic field, revealing Landau level quantization effects and their experimental signatures.

Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation of the DOS in a QSL with spinon Fermi surface under magnetic fields, highlighting Landau level features and bound state behaviors.

Findings

Landau levels cause steps at Hubbard band edges.

Weak gauge binding creates resonance peaks at band edges.

Strong gauge binding leads to in-gap bound states with quadratic energy decrease.

Abstract

Quantum spin liquid (QSL) with spinon Fermi surface is an exotic insulator that hosts neutral Fermi surfaces inside the gap. In an external magnetic field, it has been pointed out that the neutral Fermi surfaces are Landau quantized to form Landau levels (LLs) due to the induced emergent gauge magnetic field. In this work, we calculate the electronic density of states (DOS) of the QSL in an orbital magnetic field. We find that the LLs from the neutral Fermi surfaces give rise to a set of steps emerging at the upper and lower Hubbard band edges. Each of the Hubbard band edge steps further develop into a band edge resonance peak when a weak gauge binding from the gauge field fluctuations is taken into account. Importantly, each Hubbard band edge step and its resulting resonance peak in the weak gauge binding are found to have a correspondence LL from the neutral Fermi surfaces, so the Hubbard band edge steps and the band edge resonance peaks are the unique features that characterize the Landau quantization of the in-gap neutral Fermi surfaces. We further consider the strong gauge binding regime where the band edge resonance peaks move into the Mott gap and develop into true in-gap bound states. In the strong gauge binding regime, we solve the bound state LL spectrum. For the bound state with a Mexican hat like band dispersion, we find that the envelop energy to have a state excited from the bound state LL decreases quadratically with the magnetic field. The quadratic decrease behavior of the envelop energy is consistent with the intuition that applying magnetic field localizes the states and energetically promotes the in-gap bound states formation. Finally, we connect our results to the electronic DOS spectra measured in the layered 1T-TaS$_2$. We point out that a QSL with a quasi-bound state in the upper Hubbard band can give the DOS spectra similar to the one measured in the experiment.