Multi-$Q$ magnetic phases from frustration and chiral interactions

Abstract

We investigate the effect of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions in the planar pyrochlore (checkerboard) antiferromagnet, one of the paradigmatic models of spin frustration, and establish the classical phase diagram using a combination of analytical and numerical approaches. While anisotropic interactions generally tend to remove the frustration, here we show that a high degree of frustration survives in a large region of the phase diagram. In conjunction with the fixed handedness introduced by the DM anisotropy, this spawns a cascade of incommensurate and double-twisted multi-domain phases, consisting of spatially intertwined domains of the underlying competing phases of the isotropic frustrated point. The results underpin a novel mechanism of generating multi-Q phases in systems that combine high degree of frustration and chiral interactions.

23 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Spontaneous Skyrmion Ground States in Magnetic Metals
• Models and Materials for Generalized Kitaev Magnetism
• The quantum origins of skyrmions and half-skyrmions in Cu2OSeO3
• Magnetic state of pyrochlore Cd2Os2O7 emerging from strong competition of ligand distortions and longer-range crystalline anisotropy
• The frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the checkerboard lattice: the $J_1$--$J_2$ model

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Double-$Q$ and quadruple-$Q$ instabilities at low-symmetric ordering wave vectors under tetragonal symmetry