Sasank Budaraju

Chiral spin liquids (CSL) based on spin-1/2 fermionic projected entangled pair states (fPEPS) are considered on the square lattice. First, fPEPS approximants of Gutzwiller-projected Chern insulators (GPCI) are investigated by variational Monte Carlo (VMC) techniques on finite-size tori. We show that such fPEPS of finite bond dimension can correctly capture the topological properties of the chiral spin liquid, as the exact GPCI, with the correct topological ground-state degeneracy on the torus.

The parton approach for quantum spin liquids gives a transparent description of low-energy elementary excitations, e.g., spinons and emergent gauge-field fluctuations. The latter ones are directly coupled to the hopping/pairing of spinons. By using the fermionic representation of the U(1) Dirac state on the kagome lattice and variational Monte Carlo techniques to include the Gutzwiller projection, we analyze the effect of modifying the gauge fields in the spinon kinematics.