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Pinwheel valence bond crystal ground state of the spin-12 Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the shuriken lattice
Date Issued
01-12-2021
Author(s)
Astrakhantsev, Nikita
Ferrari, Francesco
Niggemann, Nils
Müller, Tobias
Chauhan, Aishwarya
Kshetrimayum, Augustine
Ghosh, Pratyay
Regnault, Nicolas
Thomale, Ronny
Reuther, Johannes
Neupert, Titus
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Abstract
We investigate the nature of the ground state of the spin-12 Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the shuriken lattice by complementary state-of-the-art numerical techniques, such as variational Monte Carlo (VMC) with versatile Gutzwiller-projected Jastrow wave functions, unconstrained multivariable variational Monte Carlo (mVMC), and pseudofermion/pseudo-Majorana functional renormalization group (PFFRG/PMFRG) methods. We establish the presence of a quantum paramagnetic ground state and investigate its nature, by classifying symmetric and chiral quantum spin liquids, and inspecting their instabilities towards competing valence bond crystal (VBC) orders. Our VMC analysis reveals that a VBC with a pinwheel structure emerges as the lowest-energy variational ground state, and it is obtained as an instability of the U(1) Dirac spin liquid. Analogous conclusions are drawn from mVMC calculations employing accurate BCS pairing states supplemented by symmetry projectors, which confirm the presence of pinwheel VBC order by a thorough analysis of dimer-dimer correlation functions. Our work highlights the nontrivial role of quantum fluctuations via the Gutzwiller projector in resolving the subtle interplay between competing orders.
Volume
104