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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Ising fracton spin liquid on the honeycomb lattice

Benedikt Placke1,*, Owen Benton1,2,†, and Roderich Moessner1,‡

  • *Contact author: placke@pks.mpg.de
  • †Contact author: j.o.benton@qmul.ac.uk
  • ‡Contact author: moessner@pks.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. B 110, L020401 – Published 1 July, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.110.L020401

Abstract

We study a classical Ising model on the honeycomb lattice with local two-body interactions and present strong evidence that at low temperature it realizes a higher-rank Coulomb liquid with fracton excitations. We show that the excitations are (type-I) fractons, appearing at the corners of membranes of spin flips. Because of the threefold rotational symmetry of the honeycomb lattice, these membranes can be locally combined such that no excitations are created, giving rise to a set of ground states described as a liquid of membranes. We devise a cluster Monte Carlo algorithm purposefully designed for this problem that moves pairs of defects, and use it to study the finite-temperature behavior of the model. We show evidence for a first order transition from a high-temperature paramagnet to a low-temperature phase whose correlations precisely match those predicted for a higher-rank Coulomb phase.

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Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. B 110, L020401– Published 1 July, 2024
  • Received 4 July 2023
  • Revised 5 February 2024
  • Accepted 18 June 2024
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by Max Planck Society.

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