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Order by disorder in classical kagome antiferromagnets with chiral interactions

Jackson Pitts1, Finn Lasse Buessen2,3, Roderich Moessner4, Simon Trebst3, and Kirill Shtengel1,4

  • 1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A7, Canada
  • 3Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, Zülpicher Straße 77, 50937 Köln, Germany
  • 4Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Nöthnitzer Straße 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany

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Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043019 – Published 10 October, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.043019

Abstract

The Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the kagome lattice is an archetypal instance of how large ground-state degeneracies arise, and how they may get resolved by thermal and quantum fluctuations. Augmenting the Heisenberg model by chiral spin interactions has proved to be of particular interest in the discovery of certain chiral quantum spin liquids. Here we consider the classical variant of this chiral kagome model and find that it exhibits, similar to the classical Heisenberg antiferromagnet, a remarkably large and structured ground-state manifold, which combines continuous and discrete degrees of freedom. This allows for a rich set of order-by-disorder phenomena. Degeneracy lifting occurs in a highly selective way, choosing already at the harmonic level specific triaxial states, which however retain an emergent Z2 degree of freedom (absent in the conventional Heisenberg model). We also study the competition of entropic and energetic ground-state selection as the model interpolates between the purely chiral and Heisenberg cases. For this mixed model, we find a “proximate ordered-by-disorder” finite-temperature regime where fluctuations overcome the energetic ground-state preference of the perturbation. Finally, a semiclassical route to a spin liquid is provided by quantum order by disorder in the purely chiral models, where the aforementioned Z2 degrees of freedom are elevated to the role of an emergent gauge field.

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Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043019– Published 10 October, 2022
  • Received 10 June 2022
  • Accepted 13 September 2022
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

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