Spin liquid phase in the Hubbard model: Luttinger-Ward analysis of the slave-rotor formalism

Abstract: We propose an approach for studying the spin liquid phase of the Hubbard model on the triangular lattice by combining the Baym--Kadanoff formalism with the slave rotor parton construction. This method enables the computation of a series of two-body Feynman diagrams for the Luttinger--Ward (LW) functional using a one-loop truncation. This approach enables us to study the U(1) quantum spin liquid phase characterized by a spinon Fermi surface and to derive the Green's functions for spinons, chargons, and electrons. Our findings extend beyond the standard mean-field approximation by accounting for the effects of gauge field fluctuations.The spatial components of the U(1) gauge field are equivalently represented by interactions that incorporate corrections from the spinon-chargon two-particle random phase approximation. This framework effectively captures the long-range correlations inherent to the U(1) quantum spin liquid and combines non-perturbative quantum field theory with the projective construction, providing new insights into the study of quantum spin liquids and other strongly correlated electron systems. We demonstrate that our approach correctly reprodues the anomalous low-temperature behavior of specific heat -- namely, the upturn in $C_V/T$ as a function of $T^2$-- in agreement with recent measurments on 1$T$ - TaS$2$. Moreover, this approach reproduces the resonant peaks in the Mott gap, as observed in cobalt atoms on single-layer 1$T$-TaSe${2}$