Chiral Spin Liquids in Arrays of Spin Chains

Chiral spin liquids were introduced in 1987 by Kalmeyer and Laughlin as exotic fractional quantum Hall state in spin systems. Their experimental realization remains elusive, however recent numerical works find these ground states in kagome spin antiferromagnets. I will formulate a coupled-chain construction for chiral spin liquids which serves as a new nonperturbative approach. It accounts for all universal properties of the chiral spin liquid: charge neutral edge states, gapped bulk spin-1/2 excitations, and ground state degeneracy on the torus; This field theoretical approach invites generalizations to more exotic chiral spin liquids and may be used to assess the existence of the chiral spin liquid as the ground state of specific lattice systems.