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  • Letter

Uncovering hidden chiral symmetry in nonbipartite kagome and pyrochlore lattices with spin-orbit coupling by the Wilson loop

Hiroki Nakai1,*, Masataka Kawano1,2, and Chisa Hotta1,†

  • 1Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan
  • 2Department of Physics, Technical University of Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany

  • *nakai-hiroki3510@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
  • †chisa@phys.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Phys. Rev. B 108, L081106 – Published 11 August, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.108.L081106

Abstract

Chiral symmetry (CS) in energy bands appears as perfectly symmetric antibonding and bonding pairs of energy levels. It has only been observed in a few classes of models when bipartite hopping occurs among their pairwise bases. We find that nonbipartite kagome and pyrochlore lattices can host CS when strong spin-orbit coupling is introduced. Unfortunately, the model exhibits an intricate frustrated hopping accompanied by spin rotation with no apparent sign of realizing CS. However, by making use of a local gauge transformation that properly rotates the spin quantization axis site-dependently, complex hopping among up- and down-spin electrons is untangled to bipartite-hopping ones. The clue to find such a transformation and to construct a chiral operator is given by the gauge invariant Wilson loop operator on a triangular unit. The framework allows us to disclose the symmetry and structures of spin-textured CS wave functions and energy bands.

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