Possible SU(3) Chiral Spin Liquid on the Kagome Lattice

Abstract: We propose an SU(3) symmetric Hamiltonian with short-range interactions on the Kagome lattice and show that it hosts an Abelian chiral spin liquid (CSL) state. We provide numerical evidence based on exact diagonalization to show that this CSL state is stabilized in an extended region of the parameter space and can be viewed as a lattice version of the Halperin 221 fractional quantum Hall (FQH) state of two-component bosons. We also construct a parton wave function for this CSL state and demonstrate that its variational energies are in good agreement with exact diagonalization results. The parton description further supports that the CSL is characterized by a chiral edge conformal field theory (CFT) of the SU(3)_1 Wess-Zumino-Witten type.