Unveiling a critical stripy state in the triangular-lattice SU(4) spin-orbital model

The simplest spin-orbital model can host a nematic spin-orbital liquid state on the triangular lattice. We provide clear evidence that the ground state of the SU(4) Kugel-Khomskii model on the triangular lattice can be well described by a "single" Gutzwiller projected wave function with an emergent parton Fermi surface, despite it exhibits strong finite-size effect in quasi-one-dimensional cylinders. The finite-size effect can be resolved by the fact that the parton Fermi surface consists of open orbits in the reciprocal space. Thereby, a stripy liquid state is expected in the two-dimensional limit, which preserves the SU(4) symmetry while breaks the translational symmetry by doubling the unit cell along one of the lattice vector directions. It is indicative that these stripes are critical and the central charge is c=3, in agreement with the SU(4)₁ Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theory. All these results are consistent with the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis-Oshikawa-Hastings theorem.