Fractionalization in an Easy-axis Kagome Antiferromagnet

Abstract

We study an antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 model with up to third nearest-neighbor couplings on the Kagome lattice in the easy-axis limit, and show that its low-energy dynamics are governed by a four site XY ring exchange Hamiltonian. Simple ``vortex pairing'' arguments suggest that the model sustains a novel fractionalized phase, which we confirm by exactly solving a modification of the Hamiltonian including a further four-site interaction. In this limit, the system is a featureless ``spin liquid'', with gaps to all excitations, in particular: deconfined S^z=1/2 bosonic ``spinons'' and Ising vortices or ``visons''. We use an Ising duality transformation to express vison correlators as non-local strings in terms of the spin operators, and calculate the string correlators using the ground state wavefunction of the modified Hamiltonian. Remarkably, this wavefunction is exactly given by a kind of Gutzwiller projection of an XY ferromagnet. Finally, we show that the deconfined spin liquid state persists over a finite range as the additional four-spin interaction is reduced, and study the effect of this reduction on the dynamics of spinons and visons.