A Classical Chiral Spin-Liquid from Chiral Interactions on the Pyrochlore Lattice

Abstract: Classical spin-liquids are paramagnetic phases which feature nontrivial patterns of spin correlations within their ground-state manifold whose degeneracy scales with system size. Often they harbor fractionalized excitations, and their low-energy fluctuations are described by emergent gauge theories. In this work, we discuss a model composed of chiral three-body spin interactions on the pyrochlore lattice that realizes a novel classical chiral spin-liquid. Employing both analytical and numerical techniques, we show that the ground-state manifold of this spin-liquid is given by a subset of the so-called color-ice states. We demonstrate that the ground states are captured by an effective gauge theory which possesses a divergence-free condition and an additional chiral term that constrains the total flux of the fields through a single tetrahedron. The divergence-free condition results in two-fold pinch points in the spin structure factor and the identification of bionic charges as the elementary excitations of the system. We discuss how the mobility of these elementary charges is restricted by the additional chiral term, which in turn suggests that these charges are fractons.