Doubts have been raised on the representation of chiral spin liquids (CSL) exhibiting topological order in terms of projected entangled pair states (PEPS). Starting from a simple spin-1/2 SU(2) chiral frustrated Heisenberg model on the square lattice [1], we show that a faithful representation of the CSL phase is in fact possible in terms of a generic PEPS upon variational optimization [2], showing a perfectly chiral gapless SU(2)_1 edge mode and a rapid decay of correlation functions at short distances consistent with a bulk gap. We argue that the observed gossamer long-range tail [1,2] originates from the PEPS bulk-edge correspondence, but does not impact the characteristic properties of the CSL. Further extensions to analogous SU(N) [3,4] chiral Heisenberg models on the square lattice revealing similar features will be briefly discussed.
[1] D. Poilblanc, Phys. Rev. B 96, 121118 (2017).
[2] Juraj Hasik, Maarten Van Damme, Didier Poilblanc, Laurens Vanderstraeten, arXiv:2201.07758.
[3] Ji-Yao Chen, Sylvain Capponi, Alexander Wietek, Matthieu Mambrini, Norbert Schuch, Didier Poilblanc, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 017201 (2020).
[4] Ji-Yao Chen, Jheng-Wei Li, Pierre Nataf, Sylvain Capponi, Matthieu Mambrini, Keisuke Totsuka, Hong-Hao Tu, Andreas Weichselbaum, Jan von Delft, Didier Poilblanc, Phys. Rev. B 104, 235104 (2021).