Helimagnons in a chiral ground state of the pyrochlore antiferromagnets

The Goldstone mode in a helical magnetic phase, also known as the helimagnon, is a propagating mode with a highly anisotropic dispersion relation. Here we study theoretically the helimagnon excitations in a complex chiral ground state of pyrochlore antiferromagnets such as spinel CdCr2O4 and itinerant magnet YMn2. We show that the effective theory of the soft modes in the helical state possesses a symmetry similar to that of smectic liquid crystals. We compute the low-energy spin-wave spectrum based on a microscopic spin Hamiltonian and find a dispersion relation characteristic of the helimagnons. By performing dynamics simulations with realistic model parameters, we also obtain an overall agreement between experiment and the numerical spin-wave spectrum. Our work thus also clarifies the mechanisms that relive the magnetic frustration in these compounds.

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