Spin Liquid Phases for Spin-1 systems on the Triangular lattice

Understand

Motivated by recent experiments on material Ba3NiSb2O9, we propose two novel spin liquid phases (A and B) for spin-1 systems on a triangular lattice.

• At the mean field level, both spin liquid phases have gapless fermionic spinon excitations with quadratic band touching, thus in both phases the spin susceptibility and C_v/T saturate to a constant at zero temperature, which are consistent with the experimental results on Ba3NiSb2O9.
• On the lattice scale, these spin liquid phases have Sp(4) ~ SO(5) gauge fluctuation; while in the long wavelength limit this Sp(4) gauge symmetry is broken down to U(1)xZ_2 in type A spin liquid phase, and broken down to Z_4 in type B phase.
• We also demonstrate that the $A$ phase is the parent state of the ferro-quadrupole state, nematic state, and the noncollinear spin density wave state.