Amorphous and polycrystalline routes towards a chiral spin liquid
Résumé
We show that a chiral spin liquid spontaneously emerges in partially amorphous, polycrystalline or ion- irradiated Kitaev materials. In these systems, time-reversal symmetry is broken spontaneously due to a non-zero density of plaquettes with an odd number of edges, nodd. This mechanism opens a sizeable gap, at small nodd compatible with that of typical amorphous materials and polycrystals, and which can alternatively be induced by ion-irradiation. We find that the gap is proportional to nodd, saturating at nodd ∼ 40%. Using exact diagonalization, we find that the chiral spin liquid is approximately as stable to Heisenberg interactions as Kitaev’s honeycomb spin liquid model. Our results open up a significant number of non-crystalline systems where chiral spin liquids can emerge without external magnetic fields.
Domaines
Matière Condensée [cond-mat]
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