| Anderson proposed in 1973 that valence bond dominated phases of quantum magnets could lead to spin liquid phases which would exhibit no long range order at T=0. These phases are harder to find than one might naively imagine for they are often undone by a quantum version of order by disorder. In an alternate version, the deconfined gauge field that would characterize a spin liquid phase can end up being confined via tunneling events. I will discuss this in the the context of quantum dimer models in two dimensions where the physics is easily understood. As a byproduct one can identify the new phenomenon of Cantor deconfinement where one gets neither a confined nor a deconfined phase - instead the deconfined phase sits on a Cantor set. I will also discuss how one can write (complicated) spin models in which this physics can be realized. |
|