Absence of U(1) spin liquids in two dimensions

Abstract

Many popular models of fractionalized spin liquids contain neutral fermionic spinon excitations on a Fermi surface, carrying unit charges under a compact U(1) gauge force. We argue that instanton effects generically render such states unstable to confinement in two spatial dimensions, so that all elementary excitations are gauge neutral, and there is no spinon Fermi surface. Similar results are expected to apply to SU(2) spin liquids. However, fractionalized states can appear when the gauge symmetry is broken down to a discrete subgroup by the Higgs mechanism. Our argument generalizes earlier results on confinement in the pure gauge theory, and on the instability of the U(1) staggered flux and algebraic spin liquids with a Dirac spectrum for fermionic spinons.

15 pages; (v2) added references

References in corpus (4)

• Permanent confinement in the compact QED3 with fermionic matter
• Phase Structure of d=2+1 Compact Lattice Gauge Theories and the Transition from Mott Insulator to Fractionalized Insulator
• Kosterlitz-Thouless-like deconfinement mechanism in the 2+1 dimensional Abelian Higgs model
• Field theories of paramagnetic Mott insulators

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