Chiral spin liquid in a frustrated anisotropic kagome Heisenberg model

Understand

Kalmeyer-Laughlin (KL) chiral spin liquid (CSL) is a type of quantum spin liquid without time-reversal symmetry, and it is considered as the parent state of an exotic type of superconductivity--anyon superconductor.

• Such exotic state has been sought for more than twenty years, however it remains unclear whether it can exist in realistic system where time-reversal symmetry is breaking (T-breaking) spontaneously.
• By using the density matrix renormalization group, we show that KL CSL exists in a frustrated anisotropic kagome Heisenberg model (KHM), which has spontaneously T-breaking.
• We find that our model has two topological degenerate ground states, which exhibit non-vanishing scalar chirality order and are protected by finite excitation gap.