Broken parity and a chiral ground state in the frustrated magnet CdCr2O4

TL;DR

This paper models the lattice distortion and magnetic order in CdCr2O4, revealing a chiral ground state caused by frustration relief via spin-Peierls distortion and spin-orbit coupling.

Contribution

It introduces a model explaining how lattice distortion leads to a chiral magnetic ground state in the frustrated magnet CdCr2O4.

Findings

Lattice distortion relieves magnetic frustration.

Chiral crystal structure is stabilized.

Magnetic order forms a long spiral with spin-orbit coupling.

Abstract

We present a model describing the lattice distortion and incommensurate magnetic order in the spinel CdCr2O4, a good realization of the Heisenberg "pyrochlore" antiferromagnet. The magnetic frustration is relieved through the spin-Peierls distortion of the lattice involving a phonon doublet with odd parity. The distortion stablizes a collinear magnetic order with the propagation wavevector q=2\pi(0,0,1). The lack of inversion symmetry makes the crystal structure chiral. The handedness is transferred to magnetic order by the relativistic spin-orbit coupling: the collinear state is twisted into a long spiral with the spins in the ac plane and q shifted to 2\pi(0,\delta,1).