p6 - Chiral Spin Liquid in the Kagome Antiferromagnet

The Kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet  is the most likely candidate for a quantum disordered ground state in  two dimensions.

State of the art  variational methods on large cylinders found no broken spin or translational symmetries, which defines a "quantum spin liquid".

However little is known about its excitation spectrum, and possible point group symmetry breaking.

Using Contractor Renormalization (CORE)  we have recently discovered spectral degeneracies in the large system limit.

These signal the onset of p6 - chirality symmetry breaking in the spin liquid phase. 

Experimentally, the p6 chiral order parameter may be detected as a splitting of the optical phonons degeneracy near the zone center.