Majorana chiral spin liquid in a model for Mott insulating cuprates

The large thermal Hall conductivity recently detected in Mott insulating cuprates has been attributed to chiral neutral spin excitations. A quantum spin liquid (QSL) with Majorana excitations, Chern number +/- 4 and large thermal Hall conductivity is found to be an excited state of a frustrated Heisenberg model on the square lattice. Using a Majorana mean-field theory and exact diagonalizations, we explore two possible routes to achieve this chiral QSL, an orbital magnetic-field effect and spin-orbit couplings as present in cuprates. In particular, we show how only the orbital magnetic field allows this topological phase to be the ground state, while it remains an excited state of the Majorana mean field under the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya terms. A large quantized low-temperature thermal Hall effect can be induced in our model of Mott insulating cuprates by the orbital effect of an applied magnetic field.

Automated summary

The large thermal Hall conductivity recently observed in Mott insulating cuprates has been attributed to chiral neutral spin excitations. A quantum spin liquid with Majorana excitations, Chern number +/- 4, and large thermal Hall conductivity has been found as an excited state of a frustrated Heisenberg model on the square lattice.