  We consider orbital magnetic field effects in a spin liquid phase of a
half-filled triangular lattice Hubbard system close to the Mott transition,
continuing an earlier exploration of a state with spinon Fermi surface.
Starting from the Hubbard model and focusing on the insulator side, we derive
an effective spin Hamiltonian up to four-spin exchanges in the presence of
magnetic field, and find that the magnetic field couples linearly to spin
chirality on the triangles. The latter corresponds to a flux of an internal
gauge field in a gauge theory description of the spin liquid, and therefore a
static such internal flux is induced. A quantitative estimate of the effect is
obtained using a spinon mean field analysis, where we find that this orbital
field seen by the spinons is comparable to or even larger than the applied
field. We further argue that because the stiffness of the emergent internal
gauge field is very small, such a spinon-gauge system is strongly susceptible
at low temperatures to an instability of the homogeneous state due to strong
Landau level quantization for spinons. This instability is reminiscent of the
so-called strong magnetic interaction regime in metals with the usual
electromagnetic field, but we estimate that the corresponding
temperature--magnetic field range is significantly broader in the spinon-gauge
system.

Strongly Correlated Electrons;Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics