Fig. 5
Magnetic flux deconfinement. Energy of a configuration with two magnetic fluxes as a function of the distance d between the associated empty hexagons, for spins S = 1/2 (bottom line) up to S = 5 (top line). The energy is measured from the value at nearest-neighbor separation d = 1. The data are extracted from exact diagonalizations on the mean-field decoupled Hamiltonian \({\cal H}_{{\mathrm{MF}}}\) discussed in the “Methods” section, using a 180-site honeycomb lattice on a torus, spanning an array of 15 × 2 empty hexagons. The data shown are along the horizontal direction up to d = 6 (higher d give a mirror image of the same data due to periodic boundary conditions)
