Topological spinon bands and vison excitations in spin-orbit coupled quantum spin liquids

Abstract

Spin liquids are exotic quantum states characterized by the existence of fractional and deconfined quasiparticle excitations, referred to as spinons and visons. Their fractional nature establishes topological properties such as a protected ground-state degeneracy. This work investigates spin-orbit coupled spin liquids where, additionally, topology enters via non-trivial band structures of the spinons. We revisit the $Z_2$ spin-liquid phases that have recently been identified in a projective symmetry-group analysis on the square lattice when spin-rotation symmetry is maximally lifted [Phys. Rev. B 90, 174417 (2014)]. We find that in the case of nearest neighbor couplings only, $Z_2$ spin liquids on the square lattice always exhibit trivial spinon bands. Adding second neighbor terms, the simplest projective symmetry-group solution closely resembles the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model for topological insulators. Assuming that the emergent gauge fields are static we investigate vison excitations, which we confirm to be deconfined in all investigated spin phases. Particularly, if the spinon bands are topological, the spinons and visons form bound states consisting of several spinon-Majorana zero modes coupling to one vison. The existence of such zero modes follows from an exact mapping between these spin phases and topological $p+ip$ superconductors with vortices. We propose experimental probes to detect such states in real materials.