Department of Physics • University of Cologne

Chiral spin liquids are highly entangled phases of interacting spins that break time reversal and inversion symmetries, but lack conventional magnetic order even at zero temperature. While chiral spin liquids have not been unambiguously observed in nature yet, they are expected to exhibit exotic properties following from a spectrum of fractional excitations. Theoretically, chiral spin liquids are often described by strongly coupled gauge theories which are hard to tackle analytically beyond mean-field approximations. In this talk, I will describe controllable approaches that allow us to understand various chiral spin liquids starting from lower-dimensional building blocks, namely arrays or junctions of Heisenberg spin chains. In the case of junctions, I will discuss the connection between chiral spin liquids and chiral fixed points of boundary conformal field theory.