Microscopic Determination of Relaxed Domain-Wall Tensions

Determine the fully relaxed microscopic free energies of the lowest-energy chirality-changing and same-chirality translation domain walls in a material-specific kagome loop-current theory, and compare their ratio with the approximately 1.12–1.13 criterion for vestigial chiral order.

Background

The phenomenological sign and soft-spin models show that a vestigial chiral phase can occur when the chirality-changing domain wall is only about 12–13% more costly than the lowest-energy same-chirality translation wall in the rigid-amplitude limit. Amplitude relaxation modifies the threshold, so the relevant quantities are the fully relaxed wall free energies rather than the bare coupling ratio. The paper does not calculate these quantities for a specific kagome compound or microscopic electronic model, leaving this as the remaining material-specific problem.