Anderson's idea of a (short-ranged) resonating valence bond (RVB) spin liquid has been the first ever proposal of what we now call a topologically ordered phase. Since then, a wealth of exactly solvable lattice models have been constructed that have topologically ordered ground states. For a long time, however, it has been difficult to realize Anderson's original vision in such solvable models, according to which the ground state has an unbroken SU(2) spin rotational symmetry and is dominated by fluctuation of singlet bonds. The kagome lattice is the simplest lattice geometry for which parent Hamiltonians stabilizing a prototypical spin-1$/$2 short-ranged RVB wave function has been constructed and strong evidence has been given that this state belongs to a topological phase. The uniqueness of the desired RVB-type ground states has, however, not been rigorously proven for the simplest possible such Hamiltonian, which acts on 12 spins at a time. Rather, this uniqueness has been demonstrated for a longer ranged (19-site) variant of this Hamiltonian by Schuch et al., via making contact with powerful results for projected entangled-pair states. In this paper, we extend this result to the 12-site Hamiltonian. Our result is based on numerical studies on finite clusters, for which we demonstrate a “ground state intersection property” with implications for arbitrary system size. We also review the relations between various constructions schemes for RVB parent Hamiltonians found in the literature.

• Received 8 November 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.89.035123