Condensed Matter and Biological Physics Seminars

The past two decades have seen the discovery of a number of strongly correlated materials with unconventional physical properties and complex phase diagrams. This has led to a number of proposals of non-trivial ground states, including the resonating valence bond (RVB) spin liquid phases, the related valence bond crystal phases, and striped phases with periods that are large (even incommensurate) compared with the scale of the underlying lattice. In this talk, I will discuss mechanisms by which such exotic phases can arise in strongly correlated quantum systems with only local interactions and no explicitly broken lattice or spin symmetries. I will do this by constructing microscopic Hamiltonians that contain these phases. Refs: PRB 72, 064413 (2005); PRB 75, 094406 (2007).