Non-Abelian chiral spin liquid on a spin-1 kagome lattice: Truncation of an exact Hamiltonian and numerical optimization

Abstract

We search for short-range Hamiltonians of finite spin-1 kagome systems, maximizing the overlaps with lattice Moore-Read states. Our starting point is an exact, long-range parent Hamiltonian for such a state on a finite plane, obtained from conformal field theory. A truncation procedure is applied to it, which retains only short-range terms and makes it easy to define the Hamiltonian on a torus. Finally, the remaining coefficients are optimized, to yield maximized overlaps between exact diagonalization results and model ground states. In the best cases, the squared overlaps exceed 0.9 and 0.8 for the three lowest states of 12- and 18-site systems, respectively, suggesting that the obtained Hamiltonians are good parent Hamiltonians for a non-Abelian topological order.