PROPERTIES OF THE CHIRAL SPIN LIQUID-STATE IN GENERALIZED SPIN LADDERS

We study zero temperature properties of a system of two coupled quantu m spin chains subject to fields explicitly breaking time reversal symm etry and parity. A suitable choice of the strength of these fields giv es a model soluble by Bethe ansatz methods which allows us to determin e the complete magnetic phase diagram of the system and the asymptotic s of correlation functions from the finite size spectrum. The chiral p roperties of the system for both the integrable and the nonintegrable case are studied using numerical techniques.