Toward the construction of realistic model Hamiltonians for chiral spin liquids

Quantum spin liquids are an unusual phase of matter that can be formed by interacting quantum spins in certain magnetic materials and are generally characterized by their long-range quantum entanglement, fractionalized excitations, absence of ordinary magnetic order, and topological order. Chiral spin liquids are a certain type of quantum spin liquid that are known ground states for Hamiltonians with three-body spin interactions. However, Hamiltonians of this type can be considered unrealistic because the three-spin interaction does not occur as the leading term in actual magnetic systems which have Hamiltonians dominated by the Heisenberg spin-spin interaction. Determining whether a quantum spin liquid may be supported in a realistic system is important for guiding experiments toward promising platforms and materials most likely to display exotic behavior. In this work, we investigate a method, established by Peterson et al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 156803 (2008)) first used for the fractional quantum Hall effect problem, to construct a realistic Hamiltonian with a topologically ordered ground state.