Quantum spin liquids in the absence of spin-rotation symmetry: Application to herbertsmithite

Abstract

It has been suggested that the nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on the Kagome lattice may be a good starting point for understanding the spin-liquid behavior discovered in herbertsmithite. In this work, we investigate possible quantum spin liquid phases in the presence of spin-rotation symmetry-breaking perturbations such as Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya and Ising interactions, as well as second-neighbor antiferromagnetic Heisenberg interactions. Experiments suggest that such perturbations are likely to be present in herbertsmithite. We use the projective symmetry group analysis within the framework of the slave-fermion construction of quantum spin liquid phases and systematically classify possible spin liquid phases in the presence of perturbations mentioned above. The dynamical spin-structure factor for relevant spin liquid phases is computed and the effect of those perturbations are studied. Our calculations reveal dispersive features in the spin structure factor embedded in a generally diffuse background due to the existence of fractionalized spin-$1/2$ excitations called spinons. For two of the previously proposed ${Z}_{2}$ states, the dispersive features are almost absent, and diffuse scattering dominates over a large energy window throughout the Brillouin zone. This resembles the structure factor observed in recent inelastic neutron-scattering experiments on singlet crystals of herbertsmithite. Furthermore, one of the ${Z}_{2}$ states with the spin structure factor with mostly diffuse scattering is gapped, and it may be adiabatically connected to the gapped spin liquid state observed in recent density-matrix renormalization group calculations for the nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model. The perturbations mentioned above are found to enhance the diffuse nature of the spin structure factor and reduce the momentum dependencies of the spin gap. We also calculate the electron spin resonance (ESR) absorption spectra that further characterize the role of spin-rotation symmetry-breaking perturbations in these states. We suggest that the measurement of ESR spectra can shed more light into the nature of the ground state in herbertsmithite.