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Nature of the Spin-Liquid Ground State of the S=1/2 Heisenberg Model on the Kagome Lattice
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Nature of the Spin-Liquid Ground State of the S=1/2 Heisenberg Model on the Kagome Lattice

Stefan Depenbrock, Ian P. McCulloch and Ulrich Schollwoeck
Physical review letters, Vol.109(6), p.067201
10/08/2012
PMID: 23006298

Abstract

Physical Sciences Physics Physics, Multidisciplinary Science & Technology
We perform a density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) study of the S = 1/2 Heisenberg anti-ferromagnet on the kagome lattice to identify the conjectured spin liquid ground state. Exploiting SU(2) spin symmetry, which allows us to keep up to 16 000 DMRG states, we consider cylinders with circumferences up to 17 lattice spacings and find a spin liquid ground state with an estimated per site energy of -0.4386(5), a spin gap of 0.13(1), very short-range decay in spin, dimer and chiral correlation functions, and finite topological entanglement gamma consistent with gamma = log(2)2, ruling out gapless, chiral, or nontopological spin liquids in favor of a topological spin liquid of quantum dimension 2, with strong evidence for a gapped topological Z(2) spin liquid.

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