Generalized route to effective field theories for quantum systems with local constraints

Effective models featuring hard local constraints describe several strongly correlated electronic systems that exhibit interesting and exotic behavior from emergent gauge symmetries to deconfined criticality and topological order. A systematic field-theoretic approach to such models remained elusive to date, with effective theories constructed from physical insight. Here, the authors propose a general large-$S$ path-integral formalism to obtain field theories for hard constrained Hamiltonians. They demonstrate its potential by performing a systematic study of quantum dimer models, including such on nonbipartite lattices.