2012/02/29 by Subhro Bhattacharjee, Yong Baek Kim, Sung-Sik Lee +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Antiferromagnetism #Condensed matter physics #Electron #Fermion #Gapless playback #Physics #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Quantum spin liquid #Spin (aerodynamics) #Spin polarization #Spinon #Spins #Theoretical physics #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological insulator #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.85.224428
published as Physical Review B 85, 224428 (2012) · 10 pages
openalex publication_date 2012/06/25 · arxiv created 2012/06/26 · arxiv updated 2012/06/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present the theory of a three-dimensional fractionalized topological insulator in the form of a U(1) spin liquid with gapped fermionic spinons in the bulk and topologically protected gapless spinon surface states. Starting from a spin-rotation-invariant spin-1/2 model on a pyrochlore lattice with frustrated antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic exchange interactions, we show that decomposition of the latter interactions, within slave-fermion representation of the spins, can naturally give rise to an emergent spin-orbit coupling for the spinons by spontaneously breaking the spin rotation symmetry. The time-reversal symmetry, however, is preserved. This stabilizes a fractionalized topological insulator which also has bulk bond spin-nematic order. We describe the low-energy properties of this state.