A classical chiral spin liquid from chiral interactions on the pyrochlore lattice

Abstract

Classical spin liquids are paramagnetic phases that 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 whose excitations are fractonalized while also displaying a fracton-like behavior. We demonstrate that the ground-state manifold of this spin liquid is given by a subset of the so-called color-ice states. We show that the low-energy 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 constraint on the gauge fields results in two-fold pinch points in the spin structure factor and the identification of bionic charges as excitations of the system.