Disorder effects in spiral spin liquids: Long-range spin textures, Friedel-like oscillations, and spiral spin glasses

Abstract

Spiral spin liquids are correlated states of matter in which a frustrated magnetic system evades order by fluctuating between a set of (nearly) degenerate spin spirals. Here, we investigate the response of spiral spin liquids to quenched disorder in a $J_1$-$J_2$ honeycomb-lattice Heisenberg model. At the single-impurity level, we identify different order-by-quenched-disorder phenomena and analyze the ensuing spin textures. In particular, we show that the latter generally display Friedel-like oscillations, which encode direct information about the spiral contour, i.e., the classical ground-state manifold. At finite defect concentrations, we perform extensive numerical simulations and characterize the resulting phases at zero temperature. As a result, we find that the competition between incompatible order-by-quenched-disorder mechanisms can lead to spiral spin glass states already at low to moderate disorder. Finally, we discuss extensions of our conclusions to nonzero temperatures and higher-dimensional systems, as well as their applications to experiments.

16+11 pages, 12+6 figures; v3: minor changes, published version

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Order-by-disorder without quantum zero-point fluctuations in the pyrochlore Heisenberg ferromagnet with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions
• Spiral Spin Liquid Noise
• Chiral order emergence driven by quenched disorder
• Stripe order in quasicrystals
• Defect-induced spin textures in magnetic solids