Pinch-points to half-moons and up in the stars: the kagome skymap

Understand

Pinch point singularities, associated with flat band magnetic excitations, are tell-tale signatures of Coulomb spin liquids.

• While their properties in the presence of quantum fluctuations have been widely studied, the fate of the complementary non-analytic features -- shaped as half-moons and stars -- arising from adjacent shallow dispersive bands has remained unexplored.
• Here, we address this question for the spin $S=1/2$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the kagome lattice with second and third neighbor couplings, which allows one to tune the classical ground state from flat bands to being governed by shallow dispersive bands for intermediate coupling strengths.
• Employing the complementary strengths of variational Monte Carlo, pseudo-fermion functional renormalization group, and density-matrix renormalization group, we establish the quantum phase diagram.