Chiral RKKY interaction in Pr2Ir2O7

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Motivated by the potential chiral spin liquid in the metallic spin ice Pr 2 Ir 2 O 7 , we consider how such a chiral state might be selected from the spin-ice manifold. We propose that chiral fluctuations of the conducting Ir moments promote ferrochiral couplings between the local Pr moments, as a chiral analog of the magnetic RKKY effect. Pr 2 Ir 2 O 7 provides an ideal setting to explore such a chiral RKKY effect, given the inherent chirality of the spin-ice manifold. We use a slave-rotor calculation on the pyrochlore lattice to estimate the sign and magnitude of the chiral coupling, and find it can easily explain the 1.5 K transition to a ferrochiral state.