title: A two-dimensional spin liquid in quantum kagome ice.
abstract: Actively sought since the turn of the century, two-dimensional quantum spin liquids (QSLs) are exotic phases of matter where magnetic moments remain disordered even at zero temperature. Despite ongoing searches, QSLs remain elusive, due to a lack of concrete knowledge of the microscopic mechanisms that inhibit magnetic order in materials. Here we study a model for a broad class of frustrated magnetic rare-earth pyrochlore materials called quantum spin ices. When subject to an external magnetic field along the [111] crystallographic direction, the resulting interactions contain a mix of geometric frustration and quantum fluctuations in decoupled two-dimensional kagome planes. Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we identify a set of interactions sufficient to promote a groundstate with no magnetic long-range order, and a gap to excitations, consistent with a Z2 spin liquid phase. This suggests an experimental procedure to search for two-dimensional QSLs within a class of pyrochlore quantum spin ice materials.
authors.affiliation: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 2Y5.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carrasquilla
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1.
authors.forename: Zhihao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.affiliation: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 2Y5.|Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1.
authors.forename: Roger G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Melko