Noncoplanar magnetic orders and gapless chiral spin liquid on the kagome lattice with staggered scalar spin chirality

Abstract

Chiral three-spin interactions can suppress long-range magnetic order and stabilize quantum spin liquid states in frustrated lattices. We study a spin-1/2 model on the kagome lattice involving a staggered three-spin interaction J_\chiJχ in addition to Heisenberg exchange couplings J_1J1 on nearest-neighbor bonds and J_dJd across the diagonals of the hexagons. We explore the phase diagram using a combination of a classical approach, parton mean-field theory, and variational Monte Carlo methods. We obtain a variety of noncoplanar magnetic orders, including a phase that interpolates between cuboc-1 and cuboc-2 states. In the regime of dominant J_{\chi}Jχ, we find a classically disordered region and argue that it may harbor a gapless chiral spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface. Our results show that the competition between the staggered three-spin interaction and Heisenberg exchange interactions gives rise to unusual ground states of spin systems.