Prof. Rodrigo Pereira

Professor, IIP-UFRN, Natal, Brazil

Chiral spin liquids are highly entangled phases of interacting spins which break time reversal and reflection symmetries. While experimental realizations are still lacking, chiral spin liquid ground states have been found numerically in a number of lattice models with frustrated and multi-spin interactions. I will talk about an analytical approach that provides information on the parameter regimes in which chiral spin liquids can be stabilized. The approach employs junctions of quantum spin chains as building blocks for two-dimensional networks, and connects chiral spin liquids to chiral fixed points of the boundary conformal field theory describing the junctions. As a first example, we recover the properties of the Kalmeyer-Laughlin state, an Abelian topological phase, from a network of spin-1/2 Heisenberg chains. I will then describe our recent results for a network of critical spin-1 chains. In this case we obtain a non-Abelian chiral spin liquid in which spinons bind Majorana zero modes.