Dr Dharmalingam Prabhakaran

Abstract:

Anderson’s groundbreaking ideas of resonant valence bond (RVB) liquid and spin-charge separation initiated a transformative shift in modern physics. Extensive implications influenced a broad spectrum of fields, from high-temperature superconductors to quantum computing, and gave birth to key concepts in physics, such as quantum spin liquids, emergent gauge symmetries, topological order, and fractionalisation. Despite extensive efforts to demonstrate the existence of an RVB phase in the Hubbard model, a definitive realisation has proven elusive. Here, we present a concise, realistic, and elegant solution to this longstanding problem by demonstrating analytically that an RVB spin liquid, exhibiting spin-charge separation, emerges as the ground state of doped Mott insulators on corner-sharing tetrahedral lattices with frustrated hopping near half-filling – a manifestation of the counter-Nagaoka effect. We confirm numerically that this result holds for finite-size systems, finite dopant density, and small exchange interactions. While much attention has been devoted to the emergence of new states from geometrically frustrated interactions, our work demonstrates that kinetic energy frustration in doped Mott insulators may be pivotal to stabilise robust, topologically ordered states in real materials.