Abelian SU(N) 1 chiral spin liquids on the square lattice
In the physics of the Fractional Quantum Hall (FQH) effect, a zoo of Abelian topological phases can be obtained by varying the magnetic field. Aiming to reach the same phenomenology in spin-like systems, in this work we propose a family of SU(N)-symmetric models in the fundamental representation, on the square lattice with short-range interactions restricted to triangular units, a natural generalization for arbitrary N of an SU(3) model studied previously where time-reversal symmetry is broken explicitly. Guided by the recent discovery of SU(2) 1 and SU(3) 1 chiral spin liquids (CSL) on similar models we search for topological SU(N) 1 CSL in some range of the Hamiltonian parameters via a combination of complementary numerical methods such as exact diagonaliza- tions (ED), infinite density matrix renormalization group (iDMRG) and infinite Projected Entangled Pair State (iPEPS). Extensive ED on small (periodic and open) clusters up to N = 10 and an innovative SU(N)-symmetric version of iDMRG to compute entanglement spectra on (infinitely-long) cylinders in all topological sectors pro- vide unambiguous signatures of the SU(N) 1 character of the chiral liquids. An SU(4)-symmetric chiral PEPS, constructed in a manner similar to its SU(2) and SU(3) analogs, is shown to give a good variational ansatz of the N = 4 ground state, with chiral edge modes originating from the PEPS holographic bulk-edge correspondence. Finally, we discuss the possible observation of such Abelian CSL in ultracold atom setups where the possibility of varying N provides a tuning parameter similar to the magnetic field in the physics of the FQH effect.