Using light to tune magnetism on the honeycomb lattice

The search for spin liquid phases in condensed matter systems has generated a lot of interest in recent years. In practice, however, such phases are usually restricted to small regions of phase diagrams, which makes them challenging to access in experiments. Concerning this issue, circularly polarized Floquet potentials have been shown to generate chiral fields on the kagome lattice, making it possible to tune between Z2 and chiral spin liquids [1]. Given the potential deconfined criticality and chiral spin liquid phases on honeycomb lattices, here we address the effects of different Floquet potentials in these lattices. We discuss, in particular, how periodic optical drives can be used to manipulate different spin exchange couplings. We also comment on how our results can be relevant to experiments.

[1] Martin Claassen, Hong-Chen Jiang, Brian Moritz, and Thomas P. Devereaux. Dynamical time-reversal symmetry breaking and photo-induced chiral spin liquids in frustrated Mott insulators. Nature Communications, 8(1):1192, 2017