Generalized route to effective field theories for quantum systems with local constraints

Abstract

Some of the exciting phenomena uncovered in strongly correlated systems in recent years—for instance, quantum topological order, deconfined quantum criticality, and emergent gauge symmetries—appear in systems in which the Hilbert space is effectively projected at low energies in a way that imposes local constraints on the original degrees of freedom. Cases in point include spin liquids, valence bond systems, dimer models, and vertex models. In this work, we use a slave boson description coupled to a large-S path integral formulation to devise a generalized route to obtain effective field theories for such systems. We demonstrate the validity and capability of our approach by studying quantum dimer models and by comparing our results with the existing literature. Field-theoretic approaches to date are limited to bipartite lattices, they depend on a gauge-symmetric understanding of the constraint, and they lack generic quantitative predictive power for the coefficients of the terms that appear in the Lagrangians of these systems. Our method overcomes all these shortcomings and we show how the results up to quadratic order compare with the known height description of the square lattice quantum dimer model, as well as with the numerical estimate of the speed of light of the photon excitations on the diamond lattice. Finally, instanton considerations allow us to infer properties of the finite-temperature behavior in two dimensions.