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.