Chiral spin liquid phase in an optical lattice at mean-field level

Abstract: We study an optical Raman square lattice with $\mathrm{U}(1)$ synthetic gauge flux to show chiral spin liquid (CSL) phase for cold atoms based on slave-rotor theory and spinon mean-field theory, respectively. An effective U($1$) gauge flux generated by Raman potentials plays a major role in realizing the CSL phase. By using slave-rotor techniques we find CSL phase at intermediate on-site Fermi Hubbard interacting regime. For the strong interacting regime we derive an effective spin model including up to the four spin interactions. By spinon mean-field analysis it is shown that CSL phase is stabilized in the case of strong magnetic frustration. The two mean-field approximation methods give consistent phase diagrams and provide qualitative numerical evidence of the CSL phase.