From Spinon Band Topology to the Symmetry Quantum Numbers of Monopoles in Dirac Spin Liquids

• Main Authors: Xue-Yang Song, Yin-Chen He, Ashvin Vishwanath, Chong Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Physical Society 2020-02-01
• Series: Physical Review X
• Online Access: http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.011033

The interplay of symmetry and topology has been at the forefront of recent progress in quantum matter. Here, we uncover an unexpected connection between band topology and the description of competing orders in a quantum magnet. Specifically, we show that aspects of band topology protected by crystalline symmetries determine key properties of the Dirac spin liquid (DSL), which can be defined on the honeycomb, square, triangular, and kagome lattices. At low energies, the DSL on all of these lattices is described by an emergent quantum electrodynamics (QED_{3}) with N_{f}=4 flavors of Dirac fermions coupled to a U(1) gauge field. However, the symmetry properties of the magnetic monopoles, an important class of critical degrees of freedom, behave very differently on different lattices. In particular, we show that the lattice momentum and angular momentum of monopoles can be determined from the charge (or Wannier) centers of the corresponding spinon insulator. We also show that for DSLs on bipartite lattices, there always exists a monopole that transforms trivially under all microscopic symmetries owing to the existence of a parent SU(2) gauge theory. We connect our results to generalized Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorems and also derive the time-reversal and reflection properties of monopoles. Our results indicate that recent insights into free-fermion band topology can also guide the description of strongly correlated quantum matter.