A quantum spin liquid (QSL) evades conventional magnetic order even at absolute zero, instead hosting fractional excitations — spinons — that carry spin-1/2 but no charge, emerging from highly entangled ground states on frustrated lattices.
Fractionalization: In a QSL, a single spin flip (ΔS=1) fractionalizes into two spinons (each ΔS=1/2) that propagate independently. On the kagome lattice — a network of corner-sharing triangles — geometric frustration prevents any classical spin arrangement from minimizing all bonds simultaneously, leaving a macroscopically degenerate ground state. The orange/pink circles show spinons; their entanglement strings (dashed lines) represent the non-local correlations of the QSL ground state. No long-range order forms even as J₂/J₁ → 0.