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Kinetic Kagome Magnetism: From Self-Trapping RVB Polarons to Semiclassical Correlations

Yufei Pei1,2, Shuai A. Chen2, Claudio Castelnovo1, and Roderich Moessner2

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 106702 – Published 31 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zbxv-vtq8

Abstract

To gain deeper insight into the role of hole kinetics in determining magnetism in highly frustrated doped Mott insulators, we consider the single-hole counter-Nagaoka problem on the kagome lattice, using magnetization as a tuning parameter. Near full polarization, a doped hole delocalizes upon binding reversed spins in a pattern of singlet bonds which we term resonating-valence-bond (RVB) polaron. These RVB polarons can have extremely small effective bandwidths, and hence exhibit self-trapping. By tuning the spin polarization, we track the evolution of these states toward the unpolarized sector, where we observe the emergence of 3×3 antiferromagnetic correlation reminiscent of the classical Potts and Heisenberg models on the kagome lattice. These results provide a framework to understand how RVB physics at short scales evolves into conventional magnetic correlations at long scales.

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References (39)

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 106702– Published 31 August, 2026
  • Received 10 June 2026
  • Accepted 17 July 2026
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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 the Max Planck Society.

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