Vestigial chirality from fluctuating loop currents on the kagome lattice
Abstract
Multicomponent order can melt in stages, leaving a composite order after its primary constituents become short ranged. We study this possibility for commensurate three-Q loop-current order on the kagome lattice. Large-scale cluster and parallel-tempering Monte Carlo simulations reveal direct and two-stage melting regimes in an effective fixed-amplitude sign model. In the latter regime, translation-sector domain walls proliferate before chirality-changing walls, restoring lattice translational symmetry while preserving long-range time-reversal-odd order. The primary M-point correlations are short ranged in this intermediate phase. The two-stage regime begins when the lowest-energy chirality-changing wall is only about $12−−13\%$ more costly than a same-chirality translation wall. Finite-size scaling of a stable amplitude-resolved Ginzburg--Landau theory shows that the phase survives amplitude relaxation. Our results establish a quantitative domain-wall criterion for vestigial loop-current order and a fluctuation route to time-reversal symmetry breaking without long-range loop-current Bragg order. This separation provides a possible thermodynamic framework for time-reversal-odd responses recently reported above the critical temperature for conventional charge-density-wave ordering in kagome metals.
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BibTeX
@misc{shi2026vestigial,
title = {{Vestigial chirality from fluctuating loop currents on the kagome lattice}},
author = {Yin Shi and Xuande Bu and Sheng Meng},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.19618},
eprint = {2609.19618},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19618},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Vestigial chirality from fluctuating loop currents on the kagome lattice
AU - Yin Shi
AU - Xuande Bu
AU - Sheng Meng
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.19618
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19618
AB - Multicomponent order can melt in stages, leaving a composite order after its primary constituents become short ranged. We study this possibility for commensurate three-Q loop-current order on the kagome lattice. Large-scale cluster and parallel-tempering Monte Carlo simulations reveal direct and two-stage melting regimes in an effective fixed-amplitude sign model. In the latter regime, translation-sector domain walls proliferate before chirality-changing walls, restoring lattice translational symmetry while preserving long-range time-reversal-odd order. The primary M-point correlations are short ranged in this intermediate phase. The two-stage regime begins when the lowest-energy chirality-changing wall is only about $12−−13\%$ more costly than a same-chirality translation wall. Finite-size scaling of a stable amplitude-resolved Ginzburg--Landau theory shows that the phase survives amplitude relaxation. Our results establish a quantitative domain-wall criterion for vestigial loop-current order and a fluctuation route to time-reversal symmetry breaking without long-range loop-current Bragg order. This separation provides a possible thermodynamic framework for time-reversal-odd responses recently reported above the critical temperature for conventional charge-density-wave ordering in kagome metals.
ER -