Absence of U(1) spin liquids in two dimensions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many popular models of fractionalized spin liquids contain neutral fermionic spinon excitations on a Fermi surface, carrying unit charges under a compact U(1) gauge force. We argue that except at possible critical points, instanton effects generically render such states unstable to confinement in two spatial dimensions, so that all elementary excitations are gauge neutral, and there is no spinon Fermi surface. Similar results are expected to apply to SU(2) spin liquids. However, fractionalized states can appear when the gauge symmetry is broken down to a discrete subgroup by the Higgs mechanism. Our argument generalizes earlier results on confinement in the pure gauge theory, and arguments for the instability of the U(1) ``staggered flux'' and ``algebraic'' spin liquids with a Dirac spectrum for fermionic spinons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".