Chiral Spin Liquids in Triangular-Lattice SU(N) Fermionic Mott Insulators with Artificial Gauge Fields

We show that, in the presence of a pi/2 artificial gauge field per plaquette, Mott insulating phases of ultracold fermions with SU(N) symmetry and one particle per site generically possess an extended chiral phase with intrinsic topological order characterized by an approximate ground space of N low-lying singlets for periodic boundary conditions, and by chiral edge states described by the SU(N)(1) Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten conformal field theory for open boundary conditions. This has been achieved by extensive exact diagonalizations for N between 3 and 9, and by a parton construction based on a set of N Gutzwiller projected fermionic wave functions with flux pi/N per triangular plaquette. Experimental implications are briefly discussed.