Monopole hierarchy in transitions out of a Dirac spin liquid

Abstract

Quantum spin liquids host novel emergent excitations, such as monopoles of an emergent gauge field. Here, we study the hierarchy of monopole operators that emerges at quantum critical points (QCPs) between a two-dimensional Dirac spin liquid and various ordered phases. This is described by a confinement transition of quantum electrodynamics in two spatial dimensions (QED3 Gross-Neveu theories). Focusing on a spin ordering transition, we get the scaling dimension of monopoles at leading order in a large-N expansion, where 2N is the number of Dirac fermions, as a function of the monopole's total magnetic spin. Monopoles with a maximal spin have the smallest scaling dimension while monopoles with a vanishing magnetic spin have the largest one, the same as in pure QED3. The organization of monopoles in multiplets of the QCP's symmetry group SU(2) x SU(N) is shown for general N.

46 pages. Paper submitted to a special issue of Annals of Physics dedicated to Philip W. Anderson

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• Properties of an algebraic spin liquid on the kagome lattice
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• Transitions to valence-bond solid order in a honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet
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• Easy-plane QED${}_3$'s in the large $N_f$ limit

Cited by in corpus (2)

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