Comment on "Absence of Spin Liquid in Nonfrustrated Correlated Systems"

Ansgar Liebsch
2013 Physical Review Letters  
In a recent Letter, Hassan and Sénéchal [1] discussed the existence of a spin-liquid phase of the half-filled Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice. Using schemes, such as the variational cluster approximation (VCA) and the cluster dynamical mean field theory (CDMFT) in combination with exact diagonalization (ED), they argued that a single bath orbital per site of the six-atom unit cell is insufficient and leads to the erroneous conclusion that the system is gapped for all nonzero values of
more » ... onsite Coulomb interaction U. In contrast, we point out here that, in the case of the honeycomb lattice, six bath levels per six-site unit cell are perfectly adequate for the description of short-range correlations. Instead, we demonstrate that it is the violation of long-range translation symmetry inherent in CDMFT-like schemes which opens a gap at Dirac points. The gap found at small U therefore does not correspond to a Mott gap. As a result, present CDMFT schemes are not suitable for the identification of a spin-liquid phase on the honeycomb lattice. [1] S.R. Hassan and D. Sénéchal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 096402 (2013).
doi:10.1103/physrevlett.111.029701 pmid:23889456 fatcat:lbuvpc4mefbqtjl35xo5pnaz5i