Majorana chiral spin liquid in Mott insulating cuprates

Abstract: The large thermal Hall conductivity recently detected in Mott insulating cuprates has been attributed to chiral neutral spin excitations. A quantum spin liquid with Majorana excitations, Chern number +/-4 and large thermal Hall conductivity is found to be an excited state of a frustrated Heisenberg model on the square lattice. Using a Majorana mean-field theory and exact diagonalizations, we explore two possible routes to achieve this chiral quantum spin liquid, an orbital effect of an applied magnetic field and spin orbit couplings as present in cuprates. In particular, we show how only the orbital magnetic field allows this topological phase to be the ground state, while it remains an excited state of the Majorana mean field under the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya terms. We interpret the large thermal Hall effect observed in Mott cuprates from their close proximity to a transition to a Majorana chiral quantum spin liquid which can be induced by an external magnetic field.