Duality, quantum skyrmions, and the stability of a SO(3) two-dimensional quantum spin glass

Quantum topological excitations (skyrmions) are analyzed from the point of view of their duality to spin excitations in the different phases of a disordered two-dimensional, short-range interacting, SO(3) quantum magnetic system of Heisenberg type. The phase diagram displays all the phases, which are allowed by the duality relation. We study the large-distance behavior of the two-point correlation function of quantum skyrmions in each of these phases and, out of this, extract information about the energy spectrum and nontriviality of these excitations. The skyrmion correlators present a power-law decay in the spin-glass (SG) phase, indicating that these quantum topological excitations are gapless but nontrivial in this phase. The SG phase is dual to the AF phase, in the sense that topological and spin excitations are, respectively, gapless in each of them. The Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless mechanism guarantees the survival of the SG phase at T≠0, whereas the AF phase is washed out to T=0 by the quantum fluctuations. Our results suggest a more symmetric way of characterizing a SG phase: one for which both the order and disorder parameters vanish, namely, ⟨σ⟩=0 and ⟨μ⟩=0, where σ is the spin and μ is the topological excitation operators.