Effects of magnetic field induced chiral-spin interactions on quasi-one-dimensional spin systems

Abstract

It is known that in certain non-bipartite quasi-one dimensional spin systems in a magnetic field, in addition to the usual Pauli coupling of the spins to the field, new parity breaking three spin interactions, i.e. chiral spin interactions, are induced at higher order due to virtual processes involving the intrinsic electronic nature of the underlying spins. The strenght of these interactions depend strongly on the orientation of the field, a feature which can be exploited to detect chiral effects experimentally. In many spin systems, these chiral interactions are generated and should be taken into account before any comparison with experiments can be made. We study the effect of the chiral interactions on certain quasi-one-dimensional gapped spin half systems and show that they can potentially alter the physics expected from the Pauli coupling alone. In particular, we demonstrate that these terms alter the universality class of the C-IC transition in spin-tubes. More interestingly, in weakly coupled XX zig-zag ladders, we find that the field induced chiral term can close the singlet gap and drive a second order transition in the non-magnetic singlet sector, which manifests itself as a two component Luttinger liquid-like behaviour in the spin correlation functions. Finally, we discuss the relevance of our results to experiments.