The emergence of gapless quantum spin liquid from deconfined quantum critical point

Abstract

A quantum spin liquid (QSL) is a novel phase of matter with long-range entanglement where localized spins are highly correlated with the vanishing of magnetic order. Such exotic quantum states provide the opportunities to develop new theoretical frameworks for many-body physics and have the potential application in realizing robust quantum computations. Here we show that a gapless QSL can naturally emerge from a deconfined quantum critical point (DQCP), which is originally proposed to describe Landau forbidden continuous phase transition between antiferromagnetic (AFM) and valence-bond solid (VBS) phases. Via large-scale tensor network simulations of a square-lattice spin-1/2 frustrated Heisenberg model, both QSL state and DQCP-type AFM-VBS transition are observed. With tuning coupling constants, the AFM-VBS transition vanishes and instead, a gapless QSL phase gradually develops in between. Remarkably, along the phase boundaries of AFM-QSL and QSL-VBS transitions, we always observe the same correlation length exponents $\nu\approx 1.0$, which is intrinsically different from the one of the DQCP-type transition, indicating new types of universality classes. Our results explicitly demonstrate a new scenario for understanding the emergence of gapless QSL from an underlying DQCP. The discovered QSL phase survives in a large region of tuning parameters and we expect its experimental realizations in solid state materials or quantum simulators.