First excitations of the spin 1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the kagom\'e lattice

We study a model of a spin S = 1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet on a one dimensional lattice with the local symmetry of the two dimensional kagom{\'e} lattice. Using three complementary approaches, it is shown that the low energy spectrum can be described by two critical Ising models with different velocities. One of these velocities is small, leading to a strongly localized Majorana fermion. These excitations are singlet ones whereas the triplet sector has a spectral gap.

Inspired by the recent discovery of a new instability towards a chiral phase of the classical Heisenberg model on the kagome lattice, we propose a specific chiral spin liquid that reconciles different, well-established results concerning both the classical and quantum models. This proposal is analyzed in an extended mean-field Schwinger boson framework encompassing time reversal symmetry breaking phases which allows both a classical and a quantum phase description. At low tem...

We study the ground state phase diagram of the quantum spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg model on the kagom\'{e} lattice with first- ($J_1 < 0$), second- ($J_2 < 0$), and third-neighbor interactions ($J_d > 0$) by means of analytical low-energy field theory and numerical density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) studies. The results offer a consistent picture of the $J_d$-dominant regime in terms of three sets of spin chains weakly coupled by the ferromagnetic inter-chain interactions ...

Starting with the sqrt{3} x sqrt{3} and the q=0 states as reference states we use the coupled cluster method to high orders of approximation to investigate the ground state of the Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the kagome lattice for spin quantum numbers s=1/2,1,3/2,2,5/2, and 3. Our data for the ground-state energy for s=1/2 are in good agreement with recent large-scale density-matrix renormalization group and exact diagonalization data. We find that the ground-state selectio...

The $S=1/2$ kagome- and triangular-lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnets are investigated using the numerical exact diagonalization and the finite-size scaling analysis. The behaviour of the field derivative at zero magnetization is examined for both systems. The present result indicates that the spin excitation is gapless for each system.

We study a class of disordered continuous classical spin systems including the kagome Heisenberg magnet. While each term in its local Hamiltonian can be independently minimised, we find {\it discrete} degenerate ground states whose number grows exponentially with system size. These states do not exhibit zero-energy `excitations' characteristic of highly frustrated magnets but instead are local minima of the energy landscape, albeit with an anomalously soft excitation spectrum...

We provide strong numerical evidence, using improved variational wave functions, for a ground state with vanishing spin gap in the spin-$1/2$ quantum Heisenberg model on the kagome lattice. Starting from the algebraic $U(1)$ Dirac spin liquid state proposed by Y. Ran $et al.$ [Phys. Rev. Lett. $98$, $117205$ ($2007$)] and iteratively applying a few Lanczos steps, we compute the lowest $S=2$ excitation constructed by exciting spinons close to the Dirac nodes. Our results are c...

We report variational Monte Carlo calculations for the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Heisenberg model on the kagome lattice in the presence of both nearest-neighbor $J_1$ and next-nearest-neighbor $J_2$ antiferromagnetic superexchange couplings. Our approach is based upon Gutzwiller projected fermionic states that represent a flexible tool to describe quantum spin liquids with different properties (e.g., gapless and gapped). We show that, on finite clusters, a gapped $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ sp...

We perform a density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) study of the S=1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the kagome lattice to identify the conjectured spin liquid ground state. Exploiting SU(2) spin symmetry, which allows us to keep up to 16,000 DMRG states, we consider cylinders with circumferences up to 17 lattice spacings and find a spin liquid ground state with an estimated per site energy of -0.4386(5), a spin gap of 0.13(1), very short-range decay in spin, dimer and c...

For the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the Kagom\'e lattice we calculate the high temperature series for the specific heat and the structure factor. A comparison of the series with exact diagonalisation studies shows that the specific heat has further structure at lower temperature in addition to a high temperature peak at $T\approx 2/3$. At $T=0.25$ the structure factor agrees quite well with results for the ground state of a finite cluster with 36 sites. A...