From M\"{o}bius aromaticity to gapped spin liquids

Motivated by the concept of M\”{o}bius aromatics in organic chemistry, the Hubbard model on ring-shaped molecules has been shown previously to support a fragile Mott insulator (FMI) ground state, which is distinct from a conventional insulator through its nontrivial transformation properties under point-group symmetry operations. In this talk, we discuss two-dimensional lattices of weakly-coupled FMI molecules belonging to multi-dimensional irreducible representations of the molecular point group. The low-energy effective Hamiltonians map onto quantum compass models with broken spin SU(2) symmetry. On the triangular lattice, the ground state develops long-range magnetism, which corresponds to a charge-ordered state of the molecules. On the honeycomb lattice, interestingly, we find a non-degenerate gapped spin-liquid ground state that preserves all spatial symmetries but transforms nontrivially under point-group operations. Our microscopic model therefore realizes an intrinsically interacting fermionic symmetry protected topological (SPT) phase.