Condensed Matter Seminar Series

Universal Spin Liquid State

Cenke Xu

Univ. of California Santa Barbara

Tuesday April 1,  11:30 am,  Room 298,  Physics Building

Abstract: Spin liquid states are ground states of quantum spin systems that do not spontaneously break any global symmetry. In the last decade tremendous progresses have been made in searching for spin liquid states in real materials. So far three different kinds of spin liquid materials all show very similar yet very exotic phenomena in experiments: these systems have metallic specific heat and spin susceptibility despite the fact that they are all insulators! We propose a universal spin liquid state that can explain all the major universal experimental facts of these materials, and we demonstrate that this spin liquid state has a very competitive energy with a realistic spin Hamiltonian. Predictions are made based on our theory that can be checked by future experiments.